tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/robert-burns-11199/articlesRobert Burns – The Conversation2023-01-24T16:11:17Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1983472023-01-24T16:11:17Z2023-01-24T16:11:17ZDiscovery of book in Scottish castle reveals fascinating detail of Robert Burns’s domestic life<p>I have experienced a few eureka moments in my career – usually the result of sheer luck or serendipity. In late 2021, I was part of the <a href="https://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/#:%7E:text='Editing%20Robert%20Burns%20for%20the,published%20by%20Oxford%20University%20Press.">Editing Burns in the 21st Century</a> team working on the new Oxford University Press edition of the <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/content/series/o/oxford-edition-of-works-of-robert-burns-oewrb/?cc=gb&lang=en&">Complete Works of Robert Burns</a>. I had been granted rare access to the collections of <a href="https://roseberyvenues.co.uk/venue/barnbougle-castle/history">Barnbougle Castle</a> on the Dalmeny Estate by the River Forth, near Edinburgh.</p>
<p>Many will recognise the castle as the <a href="http://www.scran.ac.uk/learning/library/homework/pdf/filmsinfo.pdf">setting</a> in the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, starring Maggie Smith. The materials there had been assembled by former prime minister (1894-5) and Earl of Rosebery, <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-prime-ministers/archibald-primrose-5th-earl-of-rosebery">Archibald Primrose</a>, who was a formidable historian and leading expert on the Scottish bard.</p>
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<img alt="A castle sitting between trees on a bright spring day with a blue sky behind." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506078/original/file-20230124-13-nucfn6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506078/original/file-20230124-13-nucfn6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506078/original/file-20230124-13-nucfn6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506078/original/file-20230124-13-nucfn6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=371&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506078/original/file-20230124-13-nucfn6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506078/original/file-20230124-13-nucfn6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506078/original/file-20230124-13-nucfn6.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=466&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Barnbougle Castle near Edinburgh, where the Burnsiana book was discovered.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dalmeny Estate</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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<p>Working through the material at Barnbougle, our team made a number of finds, including at least one new manuscript. More than satisfied with our excellent pickings, we were packing up to leave when our host Lady Jane Kaplan, great granddaughter of Rosebery, asked if we would like to look at one more item. This was an album marked “Burnsiana”, which had been acquired in the 1890s, but had not been subject to outside scrutiny since.</p>
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<img alt="A blue and gold embossed 18th century book entitled " src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506076/original/file-20230124-26-1bclv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/506076/original/file-20230124-26-1bclv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506076/original/file-20230124-26-1bclv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506076/original/file-20230124-26-1bclv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=822&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506076/original/file-20230124-26-1bclv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506076/original/file-20230124-26-1bclv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/506076/original/file-20230124-26-1bclv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1033&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The newly discovered book.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Glasgow University</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>When I opened it, I found it difficult to believe what I was seeing: there among the contents was page after page of listed building materials for Burns’s first marital home and <a href="https://www.ellislandfarm.co.uk/about/">farm-steading at Ellisland</a> in Dumfriesshire. </p>
<p>These domestic items were listed with prices from Burns’s builder, Thomas Boyd. For example, there were details of 500 dozen roof-slates and their sizes; doors; windows with frames and their dimensions; silk cords; the items bought for the construction of presses (cupboards) in the bedroom and elsewhere; joists; screws; lintels; flooring and so on. The lists also contain quantities of thread, plates, buttons, beer and other items for the domestic economy.</p>
<p>Now this detailed ledger will help historians reconstruct the poet’s beloved farm as it was when he and his family first lived in it.</p>
<h2>Burns’ beloved Ellisland</h2>
<p>The spectacularly beautiful setting by the River Nith immediately inspired the bard on first viewing, and he decided to build a farm there for his wife Jean Armour and their young family. Burns occupied Ellisland from 1788-91, writing around a quarter of his entire output there, including his greatest hits <a href="https://poets.org/poem/auld-lang-syne">Auld Lang Syne</a> and <a href="http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/tamoshanter.htm">Tam o’ Shanter</a>.</p>
<p>I would have understood the significance of these domestic lists even if I had not been secretary of the board of trustees at Ellisland since 2020. However, in this role I was particularly aware that Burns’s farm had been gifted to the nation in the 1920s, having been in private hands until then.</p>
<p>Unquestionably Rosebery himself would have understood what he was looking at, but the material actively takes on the significance it has, chiefly because Ellisland became a heritage site and tourist attraction a century ago.</p>
<p>Over the years there has been much speculation about precisely which parts of the several buildings Burns had a direct hand in, and there are many questions too about the interior of the main farmhouse, which has been much remodelled since the Burns family inhabited it.</p>
<p>Thanks to the incredible detail contained in this new material, we will be in a position to re-imagine the interior of Burns’s farmhouse with much greater accuracy. Not only will the new information allow forensic historical architectural investigation, it also raises exciting possibilities in the context of the new XR (extended-reality computer reconstruction) of Ellisland. </p>
<p>The timing of the discovery is fortuitous too, as the Robert Burns Ellisland Trust has been involved in a series of extensive developments for the site over the past three years, and has begun to garner considerable project funding.</p>
<p>What better way to celebrate Burns Night this year than with this cache of historical detail that opens up Burns’ domestic life in the rural home he loved so much.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/198347/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gerard Carruthers has received funding for his work from AHRC. </span></em></p>The detailed ledger will help historians reconstruct the poet’s beloved farm as it was when he and his family first lived in it.Gerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1533802021-01-21T21:48:42Z2021-01-21T21:48:42ZHow new and ‘auld’ acquaintances are celebrating Scotland’s national bard on Robbie Burns Day<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379998/original/file-20210121-17-obls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Both governments and community organizations promote Robert Burns suppers. Here, an official United Kingdom government photo shows the haggis brought in at the British Prime Minister's residence, Jan. 22, 2018. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Number 10/Flickr)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Jan. 25 is the day when people in Scotland and around the world fete <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns">Scotland’s national bard, Robert (“Rabbie” or “Robbie”) Burns</a>. </p>
<p>The 18th-century poet’s radical <a href="https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/robert-burns-politics-were-open-secret-civil-service-1432455">messages of political equality</a> penned in a <a href="https://books.google.ca/books/about/Burns_the_Radical.html?id=QkdaAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">time of populist agitation against the state</a> have attracted both long-standing popular interest and scholarly debate. Scholars have also explored an <a href="https://books.openedition.org/pufc/9088?lang=en">ecological consciousness that pervades his work</a>. </p>
<p>While <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-30878982">Burns’s womanizing</a> and his rebuke of <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-burns">orthodox religion and conventional morality</a> often attract popular attention, now as in his time (1759-96), the quality and substance of his poetry continue to capture the imagination. </p>
<p>Burns embraced the <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/08/despite-disputes-over-whether-scots-is-separate-language-or-dialect-of-english-scots-wikipedia-showcases-vibrant-speaker-and-editor-community.html">vocabulary of his native lowland region of Scotland</a>. In “A Red, Red Rose,” he spoke of: “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43812/a-red-red-rose">luve … Till a’ the seas gang dry</a>.” </p>
<p><a href="https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/highland-games">Like Highland games</a> that are organized across the globe, and tartans worn at weddings worldwide, Burns has become an essential part of Scotland’s brand in a <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Tourism-Land-and-Landscape-in-Ireland-The-Commodification-of-Culture/James/p/book/9780367868765">globalized era where markers of national difference</a> are central to tourism. <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781611480306/Robert-Burns-in-Global-Culture">Both Burns and the suppers that celebrate him have proven remarkably malleable symbols</a> worldwide of the Scottish nation <a href="https://doi.org/10.1386/hosp.9.2.161_1">and Scottish hospitality</a>.</p>
<h2>Festive and flexible</h2>
<p>Burns supper traditions are held on the bard’s date of birth. These events have proven remarkably festive, flexible and open, something that matters in the context of <a href="https://www.centreonconstitutionalchange.ac.uk/news-and-opinion/multicultural-scotland">an increasingly</a> <a href="https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/files//statistics/nrs-visual/pop-cob-nat-19-20/pop-cob-nat-19-20-info.pdf">culturally and racially diverse Scotland</a>, where some are involved in <a href="https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/family/scottish-independence-could-scotlands-2021-election-provoke-second-referendum-and-what-has-boris-johnson-said-3084790">articulating a vision for independence</a>. Unlike other <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/eu_referendum/results">parts of the United Kingdom, Scotland</a> voted <a href="https://www.gov.scot/brexit/#:%7E:text=The%20people%20of%20Scotland%20voted,elements%20of%20the%20future%20relationship.">to stay within the EU</a>. </p>
<p>In recent years, organizers in Scotland have planned <a href="https://www.scottishfield.co.uk/culture/whatson/big-burns-supper-event-has-something-for-all">LGTBQ+ Burns themed</a> events and a <a href="https://bemis.org.uk/swf-events">kosher Burns supper</a>. The organization Glasgow Afghan United has brought Burns <a href="https://www.thenational.scot/news/15898026.pictures-burns-rumi-celebrated-scotlands-afghan-community/">into dialogue with 13th century Sufi poet Rumi</a> while serving both haggis and Afghan biryani. </p>
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<p>Scholar Nathalie Duclos who has researched the movement for Scottish independence and the 2014 referendum notes the governing Scottish National Party (SNP) has advanced a conception of Scotland as a <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/856">social democratic society while emphasizing Scottish citizenship “based on residency rather than ancestry.”</a></p>
<p>Many Scots are now <a href="https://theconversation.com/scotland-could-vote-to-separate-in-2021-testing-canadas-independence-formula-151975">pushing for a second independence referendum</a>, which some hope will allow the country to embark on a new partnership with Europe and the wider world. The SNP argues that <a href="https://doi.org/10.4000/osb.1807">progressivism provides a logic for independent nationhood</a>. </p>
<p>This year, as COVID-19 hinders get-togethers and forces adaptations, could Burns be just the figure to supply both Scotland and the world with a symbol of Scotland’s progressivism, adaptability and inclusivity? </p>
<h2>Supper: haggis, ‘neeps’ and ‘tatties’</h2>
<p>The customary Burns supper boasts colourful Scottish regalia, good-humoured speeches and, of course, the country’s famous dish of haggis (a savoury, encased pudding of sheep organs, onion, oatmeal, suet and spice), with the traditional accompaniments of “neeps” (turnips) and “tatties” (potatoes). </p>
<p>The Selkirk Grace — a <a href="https://www.visitscotland.com/about/famous-scots/robert-burns/burns-night">short, evocative prayer written in the Scots vernacular —precedes the meal</a>. Often it seems as if the haggis takes centre stage. The humble pudding is piped into the event, and all are treated to <a href="https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/address-haggis/">Burns’ whimsical “Address to a Haggis.”</a></p>
<p>The haggis is toasted before guests tuck into this Scottish delicacy. The customary order of the evening, which involves liberal offerings of whisky drams, include a keynote speaker who extols Burns. </p>
<p>Another offers a “Toasts to the Lassies,” traditionally written and offered by a male, ideally a mixture of “gallantry and farce” that references’ Burns’s verse, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuXlKBXi_kE">according to Scottish writer Alasdair Hutton</a>, a veteran toaster. Following this is an often-ribald reply from “the lassies” to “the laddies.” </p>
<p>The event typically wraps up with a rousing version of Burns’ <a href="https://www.scotland.org/features/the-history-and-words-of-auld-lang-syne">“Auld Lang Syne,” known the world over as the song that rings in the New Year</a>. </p>
<p>The Burns supper is a highlight of the Scottish calendar, along with <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/20556587">St. Andrew’s Day and Hogmanay (the two-day celebration of the new year)</a>.</p>
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<img alt="Food on a table." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380018/original/file-20210121-15-mwhm8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/380018/original/file-20210121-15-mwhm8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380018/original/file-20210121-15-mwhm8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380018/original/file-20210121-15-mwhm8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380018/original/file-20210121-15-mwhm8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380018/original/file-20210121-15-mwhm8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/380018/original/file-20210121-15-mwhm8l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The traditional meal includes haggis, ‘neeps’ (turnips) and ‘tatties’ (potatoes).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Shutterstock)</span></span>
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</figure>
<h2>Global Burns</h2>
<p>This year, for many, Burns Night will depart from convention. On the Mediterranean island of Malta, there will be no Burns supper in 2021, reports John Lejman, a long-time member of the Saint Andrew Society that organizes suppers. But in Dunedin, New Zealand, success in containing the novel coronavirus means <a href="https://otagomuseum.nz">the event is expected to unfold much like it has in previous years</a>, says Seán Brosnahan, a Burns supper organizer. </p>
<p>In Canada, the Scottish Society of Ottawa (the chilly home city of <a href="https://www.kiltskate.com/">the Kilt Skate event</a>) is <a href="https://ottscot.ca">hosting a virtual celebration</a> that includes a pre-taped address from <a href="http://www.grahammctavish.com">Scottish actor Graham McTavish</a> of <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3006802/"><em>Outlander</em> fame</a>. Going virtual has spurred collaboration with the St. Andrew’s Society of Montréal and others. </p>
<p>The event will highlight Burns’ ecological message by virtually showcasing <a href="https://www.cryptic.org.uk/portfolio/primordial-waters">“Primordial Waters,” a collaborative sound and video display by Glasgow-based artist Heather Lander and musician and composer Alex Smoke</a>. This work, with its water focus, resonates with the Scotland’s <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-50808243">priorities around climate change</a> in the run up to COP26 — the UN climate conference <a href="https://ukcop26.org">in Glasgow later this year</a>. </p>
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<iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/352471599" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="" mozallowfullscreen="" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">‘Primordial Waters.’</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Its place at a Burns supper reminds us that Rabbie Burns can be invoked and involved in a variety of ambitious new political programs, including a <a href="https://www.gov.scot/policies/climate-change">net-zero carbon emissions policy that the Scottish Government is pursuing to position itself as a world leader</a>.</p>
<h2>Re-fashioning the lowland Scot</h2>
<p>In Burns’s homeland, <a href="https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/robert-burns-birthplace-museum/highlights/burns-cottage">in Burns Cottage</a>, where the first recorded supper was held in 1801, <a href="https://friendsofrbbm.org.uk">a virtual Burns supper is in the works</a>. The Black and Ethnic Minorities Infrastructure in Scotland, a Scottish government body, is offering small grants “<a href="https://bemis.org.uk/swf-fund-burns-day-2021">to bring multicultural Burns Nights to homes across the country</a>,” and notes that “diverse ethnic and <a href="https://bemis.org.uk/swf-fund-burns-day-2021">cultural minority communities are key elements of Scotland’s past, present and future</a>.”</p>
<p>Researchers at the University of Glasgow are mapping over 2,500 Burns suppers <a href="https://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/supper-map">globally and capturing their activities in a digital inventory</a>. The study is led by <a href="https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/staff/gerardcarruthers/">Gerard Carruthers, professor of Scottish literature</a>, and <a href="https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/staff/paulmalgrati/#biography">Paul Malgrati, who wrote a PhD on Burns in Scottish politics</a>. It reveals the global reach of an event rooted in history, but adapting to new contexts.</p>
<p>Whether in your household or as a participant connecting virtually on Burns Night this year, festivities are an occasion to raise a dram to Rabbie Burns — a poet whose verses may have been penned in a regional tongue, but who is claimed as an inspiration around the world. </p>
<p>The toast is not just for verses that have transcended centuries, but for the man who penned them, who in death has proven to be Scotland’s most resilient and versatile icon.</p>
<p><em>This is a corrected version of a story originally published Jan. 21, 2021. The earlier story incorrectly identified Alex Smoke.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153380/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Both Burns and the suppers that celebrate him have proven remarkably malleable symbols worldwide of the Scottish nation and Scottish hospitality.Kevin James, Professor, History, University of GuelphAndrew P. Northey, Research Assistant, Centre for Scottish Studies, University of GuelphDylan Parry-Lai, Research Assistant, Centre for Scottish Studies, University of GuelphLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1304392020-01-24T14:36:33Z2020-01-24T14:36:33ZRemembering Robert Burns has never been straightforward<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311725/original/file-20200124-162194-1hcxoxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/burns-night-supper-colourful-card-vector-1616448898">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The memory of the Ayrshire-born Scottish poet <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-burns">Robert Burns</a> has always been complicated, especially in Dumfries, the town where he died in July 1796. In the years following his untimely demise at the age of 37, literary tourists including <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/dorothy-wordsworth">Dorothy Wordsworth</a> and <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-keats">John Keats</a> visited this market town in south-west Scotland in search of their hero. What they found, however, was a vision of Burns and of Scotland itself that seemed out of place, difficult to comprehend and yet intensely personal.</p>
<p>Burns’s own relationship to Dumfriesshire was enigmatic from the start. When he arrived to take up the tenancy of Ellisland farm in the summer of 1788, he declared himself in a “land unknown to prose or rhyme”. But Burns’s view of the region would evolve many times. By August of the same year, he was commemorating the Nith Valley’s “fruitful vales”, “sloping dales” and “lambkins wanton”, and had already written back in October 1787 that: “The banks of Nith are as sweet, poetic ground as any I ever saw.”</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311790/original/file-20200124-81399-xtt2tb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311790/original/file-20200124-81399-xtt2tb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311790/original/file-20200124-81399-xtt2tb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311790/original/file-20200124-81399-xtt2tb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311790/original/file-20200124-81399-xtt2tb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311790/original/file-20200124-81399-xtt2tb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311790/original/file-20200124-81399-xtt2tb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dumfries, where Burns died in 1796.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/view-devorgilla-bridge-dumfries-galloway-scotland-1130811080">Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>Burns composed some of his best-known work during these years, including what many consider his masterpiece, <a href="http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/tamoshanter.htm0">Tam o’ Shanter</a>. And yet a shift in focus from poetry to songwriting – as he worked to collect, revise and compose lyrics for collections of national song – changed the sense of both place and personality in his writing. In his earlier years, Burns’s poetry had often been intensely self-reflective, rooting a version of himself in the Ayrshire landscape where he was raised. Now, his persona receded into the background due to the inherently communal nature of folksong.</p>
<p>At the same time, Burns’s employment as an excise officer and his eventual poor health in Dumfries would lead 19th-century commentators such as the historian <a href="https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/features/who-was-thomas-carlyle">Thomas Carlyle</a> to accuse the town of wasting the poet’s talents through a lack of patronage. That underestimates Burns’s agency as a member of the lower middle class, who took pride in supporting his family independently. Yet still, what emerged was a lingering sense of the Ayrshire Burns as the true Burns, where the Dumfries Burns was only a tragic, diminished echo of himself.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311792/original/file-20200124-81369-1r7clax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311792/original/file-20200124-81369-1r7clax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311792/original/file-20200124-81369-1r7clax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311792/original/file-20200124-81369-1r7clax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311792/original/file-20200124-81369-1r7clax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311792/original/file-20200124-81369-1r7clax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311792/original/file-20200124-81369-1r7clax.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<h2>Poetic pilgrimage</h2>
<p>In 1803, Dorothy Wordsworth set off from the Lake District on a tour of Scotland in the company of her <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-wordsworth">brother William</a> and <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/samuel-taylor-coleridge">Samuel Taylor Coleridge</a>. Among key items on their itinerary was a pilgrimage to Burns sites in and around Dumfries. Yet the poet’s memory would not be easily reckoned with.</p>
<p>In her tour journal, Wordsworth quoted Burns’s own A Bard’s Epitaph – “thoughtless follies laid him low, | And stain’d his name” – to underline the moral failings of a poet already famous for his love affairs and heavy drinking. She wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We could think of little else but poor Burns, and his moving about on that unpoetic ground.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Burns proved an inescapable but difficult presence in Dumfries for Wordsworth. He became representative of a south-west Scotland that defied easy comprehension: neither quite “the same as England” nor “simple, naked Scotland”.</p>
<p>Further north at Ellisland farm, Wordsworth remembered catching a view back home to “the Cumberland mountains”. The idea was taken up by her brother in a poem originally titled Ejaculation at the Grave of Burns, in which William imagined himself and Burns as the hills of Criffel and Skiddaw staring at one another across the Solway Firth. Yet the dead poet remained out of reach, leaving these tourists to their personal musings about Dumfriesshire in the terms of tragedy: a visit to Burns in 1803 was already seven years too late.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311791/original/file-20200124-81395-1ajzhek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311791/original/file-20200124-81395-1ajzhek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311791/original/file-20200124-81395-1ajzhek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311791/original/file-20200124-81395-1ajzhek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=818&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311791/original/file-20200124-81395-1ajzhek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1028&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311791/original/file-20200124-81395-1ajzhek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1028&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311791/original/file-20200124-81395-1ajzhek.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1028&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Keats made a pilgrimmage to Burns’s grave.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/john-keats-17951821-he-english-romantic-1383812480">Shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>If anything, the situation was even more pronounced in John Keats’s <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-92243-0_8">account of his 1818 walking tour</a>, in which Dumfries shoulders much of the blame for the tragic story of this “poor unfortunate fellow”. Keats would find himself disgusted at the tourism industry that had already sprung up at the poet’s birthplace further north in Ayrshire. </p>
<p>But when confronted with the spectacle of Burns’s death, Keats apparently struggled to make much sense of Dumfries at all. Performing a kind of theatrical bewilderment in On Visiting the Tomb of Burns, he wrote that the town seemed “beautiful, cold – strange – as in a dream”.</p>
<h2>Memory and imagination</h2>
<p>It is difficult to overstate the impact of Burns’s legacy in south-west Scotland, for better or worse. His influence on following generations of poets in the region could be both inspiring and suffocating, while civic pride in his memory took on new forms in Dumfries as elsewhere throughout the 19th century, not least in the extravagant centenary celebrations <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9781137412140_3">in 1859</a>.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311793/original/file-20200124-81336-t2wky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/311793/original/file-20200124-81336-t2wky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311793/original/file-20200124-81336-t2wky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311793/original/file-20200124-81336-t2wky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=586&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311793/original/file-20200124-81336-t2wky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311793/original/file-20200124-81336-t2wky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/311793/original/file-20200124-81336-t2wky.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=736&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>Today, when the poet’s birthday is marked on January 25 around the world, many different and contradictory versions of Burns will be remembered. In their complex responses to Dumfries, where the poet’s death has often seemed more tangible than his birth, early literary tourists like the Wordsworths and Keats show that this is nothing new.</p>
<p>After all, the role of a national poet – a vehicle for our thoughts and dreams – underlines how much of both memory and geography is the work of the imagination.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/130439/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gerard Lee McKeever receives funding from the British Academy and was formerly a researcher for the AHRC-funded 'Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century' project.</span></em></p>Different and contradictory versions of the poet have existed since the first literary tourists went looking for his legacy.Gerard Lee McKeever, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1292582019-12-31T10:07:11Z2019-12-31T10:07:11ZThe hangover in literature, from Shakespeare and Burns to Bridget Jones<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308311/original/file-20191230-11891-1g8n5c0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C25%2C5734%2C3802&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Africa Studio via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>What a subject! And, in very truth, for once, a ‘strangely neglected’ one. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>So Kingsley Amis began his famous 1971 <a href="https://shirazsocialist.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/kingsley-amis-on-the-hangover/">essay on the hangover</a> How different is our present moment, when it would be hard to find a media outlet on New Year’s Day not featuring an item about the effectiveness of remedies. Every age has its preferred cure: Pliny the Elder advocated <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/in-search-of-a-cure-for-the-dreaded-hangover/">raw owl’s eggs in wine</a>. Shakespeare refers to “small ale”, which remained popular into the 19th century. The early 20th century was the golden age of hangover cocktails such as the Bloody Mary and the Prairie Oyster – but also of Alka-Seltzer. Amis recommends a “<a href="https://drunkard.com/0805_kingsley/">Polish Bison</a>” – vodka mixed with hot Bovril.</p>
<p>Even scientists have got involved and <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3827719/">hangover research</a> is a subfield of medicine and psychology. Studies have <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2005-04292-004">explored links</a> between hangover severity and alcohol use disorders, the hangover’s economic cost, the effectiveness of remedies and the ethical implications of a pharmaceutical cure.</p>
<p>The bad news is that, if you’re feeling unwell this morning, all <a href="https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ben/cdar/2010/00000003/00000002/art00007">reputable studies</a> have shown that the only thing guaranteed to relieve symptoms is the passing of time.</p>
<p>To be fair, Amis never thought that remedies – and physical after-effects including headache, nausea and dehydration – had been ignored. What had really been neglected was what he termed the hangover’s “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB121097388467299643">metaphysical superstructure</a>”. That is all the emotional baggage that often follows drinking: guilt, shame, self-pity and the more nebulous “<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-causes-hangovers-blackouts-and-hangxiety-everything-you-need-to-know-about-alcohol-these-holidays-127995">hangxiety</a>”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-causes-hangovers-blackouts-and-hangxiety-everything-you-need-to-know-about-alcohol-these-holidays-127995">What causes hangovers, blackouts and 'hangxiety'? Everything you need to know about alcohol these holidays</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Science can tell us why we feel sick after heavy drinking: dehydration, contracted blood vessels causing headaches and the build-up of acetaldehyde. But when a hangover makes us unwell we don’t just mean physical symptoms. </p>
<p>Science finds emotions less susceptible to measurement than physical effects. For the former, we require literature and the arts. Literature is an outlet for feeling, but also an expression of individual and cultural values. There is a surprisingly rich tradition of hangover literature in western culture – in writers as diverse as Shakespeare and Jane Austen, Robert Burns and George Eliot, Jean Rhys and Helen Fielding – that has been largely ignored and goes some way to explaining why hangovers might make us feel like mending our ways.</p>
<h2>Hangover literature</h2>
<p>In a 1791 <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=_QYIAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA449&lpg=PA449&dq=robert+burns,+I+write+you+from+the+regions+of+hell,+amid+the+horrors+of+the+damned&source=bl&ots=vuUGPw8vgb&sig=ACfU3U06e5ZksAAQ8_E6PKyKBXgypWBm5g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi86fm3td3mAhXcQEEAHYJvA_cQ6AEwAXoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&q=robert%20burns%2C%20I%20write%20you%20from%20the%20regions%20of%20hell%2C%20amid%20the%20horrors%20of%20the%20damned&f=false">epistle to Maria Riddell</a>, a wretchedly hungover Burns apologises for an unwanted sexual advance on her sister-in-law. “I write you from the regions of hell, amid the horrors of the damned”, he begins, before bemoaning his “aching head reclined on a pillow of ever-piercing thorn”, and “an infernal tormentor” called “Recollection”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308310/original/file-20191230-11900-1ao2cfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308310/original/file-20191230-11900-1ao2cfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308310/original/file-20191230-11900-1ao2cfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308310/original/file-20191230-11900-1ao2cfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=548&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308310/original/file-20191230-11900-1ao2cfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308310/original/file-20191230-11900-1ao2cfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308310/original/file-20191230-11900-1ao2cfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=688&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Robert Burns: recollection seems to be the hardest word.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alexander Nasmyth</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is penitent’s rhetoric, reminding us that Burns lived in rigidly moral Presbyterian Scotland. Pounding head and dehydration are just reprisal for his indiscretion and his letter is an apology for sinfulness. Shame is a powerful cultural force: if there is a cure here it will be found in forgiveness.</p>
<p>Hangovers often reveal the personal and social values that make us feel “bad”. In other words, the hangover is both a physical and cultural deterrent. Guilt and shame are not just nervous reflexes but part of a superstructure of values – Amis chose his words wisely – without which they cannot be understood.</p>
<h2>Men and women</h2>
<p>Science argues that hangover severity is different for men and women, focusing on metabolism and body mass. But surely the real differences are sociocultural? We could compare the hangovers of the alcoholic journalist, Peter Fallow, from Tom Wolfe’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jan/10/bonfire-of-vanities-tom-wolfe">The Bonfire of the Vanities</a> (1987), with those suffered by Helen Fielding’s ladette, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/27/bridget-jones-s-diary-helen-fielding-book-club">Bridget Jones</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308308/original/file-20191230-11909-vbkvg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/308308/original/file-20191230-11909-vbkvg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308308/original/file-20191230-11909-vbkvg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308308/original/file-20191230-11909-vbkvg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308308/original/file-20191230-11909-vbkvg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308308/original/file-20191230-11909-vbkvg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/308308/original/file-20191230-11909-vbkvg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bridget Jones the morning after the night before.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (Universal Pictures)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When hungover, Fallow seeks penance through strenuous exercise: “Never again. He would begin an exercise regimen tonight. Or tomorrow, in any case.” Wolfe makes it evident that hangxiety is not free floating, but derives from Fallow’s impression of being culturally tarnished: “It wouldn’t be this pathetic American business of jogging, either. It would be something clean, crisp, brisk, strenuous … English.” The body is a site of cultural meaning.</p>
<p>Jones faces low self-esteem when hungover. Her worries superficially recall those of Fallow, but her negative self image involves the distinctive pressures put upon women to marry and have children. She obsesses about weight gain, her looks (“Oh why am I so unattractive? Why?”), her ability to attract a partner and her ticking body clock.</p>
<h2>Family values</h2>
<p>The hangover’s impact on family life has been the focus of hangover studies. Here literature also points us to cultural variables.</p>
<p>The wife who nags her husband for his drunken ways is a stock figure of comic fiction from the 16th century to the present day. John Taylor captures the type in his colourful <a href="https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A13439.0001.001?view=toc">Skimmington’s Lecture</a> (1639): </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What not a word this morning … have you lost your tongue, you may be ashamed, had you any grace in you at all, to bee such a common drunkard, a pisse-pot.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But in the Victorian period Janet Dempster in Eliot’s <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/24035174_Women_Alcohol_and_Femininity_A_Discourse_Analysis_of_Women_Heavy_Drinkers'_Accounts">Janet’s Repentance</a> (1857) tells us of a different domestic power dynamic. Because she is unable to reproach her abusive, though popular, husband, she drowns her sorrows. While Robert’s “good head” for drink is legendary, Janet’s hangovers mean she neglects housework and loses her “good” reputation. Her shame shows that she is held to a different set of standards than her husband, the “stigmatising subject position” of women drinkers. (Janet is, however, able to repent, while Robert ends up dying after delirium tremens.)</p>
<h2>Cultural resistance</h2>
<p>It is possible to defy moral judgement for our lack of self-care, wasted time or embarrassment. However, even the most rebellious of literature’s drinkers feel self-doubt bite during hangovers. Martin Amis’s John Self (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/may/15/martin-amis-money-tv-series">Money, 1984</a>), Alan Sillitoe’s Arthur Seaton (<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/content/articles/2008/04/11/east_midlands_sillitoe_s13_w8_feature.shtml">Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, 1958</a>) and A. L. Kennedy’s Hannah Luckraft (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/aug/28/fiction.alismith">Paradise, 2004</a>) are notorious for recklessness and defiance when drunk. Their hangovers are, however, some of the most crippling in literature. Luckraft revels in blackouts and casual sexual encounters, but admits: “Inside, I am mostly built out of remorse.” Self’s hangovers are a necessary curb on a particularly toxic brand of masculinity. Seaton’s motto is “don’t let the bastards grind you down”, but the hangover of Sunday morning succeeds boozy Saturday nights and he eventually submits to marriage and a steady job.</p>
<p>Literature shows that hangovers are rarely just a collection of physical symptoms. A recent <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/feb/10/the-guardian-view-on-the-science-of-hangovers-no-more-research-needed">leader article in The Guardian</a> was given the headline: “The Guardian view on the science of hangovers: no more research needed”. Perhaps we don’t need another article about the best remedies – but it is worth reflecting that there is much more to a hangover than bodily symptoms. </p>
<p>Hangover literature tells us quite a lot about our attitudes to alcohol, how they form and what they mean. This New Year, alongside the Bloody Mary, it might just be worth picking up a book. I don’t claim it will make anyone feel better, but it could help us understand a little more about why drinking often makes us feel bad about ourselves.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129258/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jonathon Shears does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Memoirs of the morning after: because literature tells us the hangover is about so much more than physical symptoms.Jonathon Shears, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Keele UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1108602019-02-06T11:09:12Z2019-02-06T11:09:12ZTourist attractions are being transformed by immersive experiences – some lessons from Scotland<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257278/original/file-20190205-86228-rh153y.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bannockburn's Battle Room. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Bright White</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Battle of Bannockburn is fought indoors on a daily basis. At least, it is in Stirling in central Scotland in 2019 at the <a href="https://battleofbannockburn.com">visitor centre</a> dedicated to the battle. A full 705 years after the Scottish forces of Robert the Bruce put paid to Edward II’s English invaders, visitors to this centre put on 3D glasses and walk into a digital recreation of 1314 and the run up to the battle. They encounter everything from archers practising their shots to Robert the Bruce <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/history/scottishhistory/independence/trails_independence_bannockburn.shtml">slaying</a> the English knight Sir Henry de Bohun. </p>
<p>From here, visitors move into the battle room, an arena in which up to 30 players gather round a computerised plan of the battlefield. They play the part of Bannockburn generals, with a real-life battle master enabling them to make strategic decisions to see if they could have done a better job than the leaders on the day. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BC8gHZEwYoc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>It’s the sort of immersive experience that many tourist attractions want to have these days. At the <a href="http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk">Burns Birthplace Museum</a> in Ayrshire, dedicated to Robert Burns, visitors can download an app aimed at children called the <a href="https://digit.fyi/augmented-reality-scottish-attractions/">Mighty Mission Trail</a>. It sends them on a virtual treasure hunt throughout the site and surroundings. Inside the museum is also a multimedia room, with interactive touchscreens that encourage children to spear haggises and scan poems by the Scottish bard. </p>
<p>Go north to <a href="https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/culloden">Culloden</a> near Inverness – the most visited battlefield site in the UK – and the solemn brutality of the conflict assails tourists in surround video. Or there is the <a href="https://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/glasgow/riversidemuseum/index.html">Riverside Museum</a> in Glasgow, where one of the star attractions is an entirely reconstructed street from the early 20th century. Visitors can loiter in a spit-and-sawdust bar; make a trip to the cobblers; or just keep clear of the horse and carriage in the middle of the road – complete with touchscreens to find out more as they explore. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257215/original/file-20190205-86195-ts2xeu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257215/original/file-20190205-86195-ts2xeu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/257215/original/file-20190205-86195-ts2xeu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257215/original/file-20190205-86195-ts2xeu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257215/original/file-20190205-86195-ts2xeu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257215/original/file-20190205-86195-ts2xeu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257215/original/file-20190205-86195-ts2xeu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/257215/original/file-20190205-86195-ts2xeu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A snapshot of old Glasgow at the Riverside Museum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/ed_webster/6863271567/in/photolist-bsu4wp-7ex7K1-awXm2o-bsu7ox-cfCKt1-bwbZLj-CRxHo8-26KtYPa-brBTcf-awUDLP-25kQa3U-bsubWn-izz3rj-26KtZNK-286P1na-272AUKs-bEwNNB-bwbYjo-bsu7Kr-rkeNiM-bsu896-283CaNL-272AU6b-d8SJML-KZ3ey1-beMpRk-272ATRU-ggm77V-qdDVYb-cfCQSU-272ATX5-286NXeg-beMpzv-rtVhsV-272AUGS-bsu67i-C2s8Tc-CYQH62-ayckQ5-Jt4dh8-bsu5dz-beMkFD-272ATES-bsu6yX-25mZifb-CYQGbg-KXRLFE-bsua4c-fKXrFk-ayc3Eu">Ed Webster</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>With virtual reality and augmented reality becoming <a href="https://www.consultancy.uk/news/17876/virtual-and-augmented-reality-market-to-boom-to-170-billion-by-2022">major growth stories</a>, they are likely to enhance tourists’ desire for immersive experiences in future. Virtual reality headsets are already creeping into tourism – the British Museum <a href="https://vimeo.com/151510535">used them</a> for a temporary exhibition on Bronze Age roundhouses, for instance. Though in many cases, headsets are going to be too isolating to be suitable in castles or museums, there is a culture developing alongside them that goes hand-in-hand. </p>
<p>This matters hugely in Scotland, which has the most visited cultural and heritage visitor attractions in the UK outside London. After a long period of growth, Glasgow and Edinburgh now attract 17m visitors a year on their own: some five times the population of the Scottish central belt. Tourism is a major driver of the Scottish economy; <a href="https://www.gov.scot/publications/tourism-scotland-economic-contribution-sector/pages/5/">it is worth</a> some £6 billion a year, about 5% of GDP, and supports 207,000 jobs. It’s therefore vitally important that the industry is alert to shifting tastes and reacts accordingly. </p>
<h2>Our research</h2>
<p>But if immersive experiences are a growth opportunity, there is little evidence about visitor preferences. To help rectify that, I’ve been leading a project known as the <a href="https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FR009104%2F1">Scottish Heritage Partnership</a>. One of <a href="https://ahrc.ukri.org/newsevents/news/ahrc-to-fund-32-projects-that-will-lead-the-way-for-future-immersive-experiences/">32 projects</a> funded by UK Research and Innovation in this area, it is the only one focused on what audiences expect and want from such attractions in the longer term. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/2D_jU1cj3V4?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>We distributed questionnaires at five major Scottish visitor sites – Bannockburn, the Burns Museum, Culloden, the Riverside and the National Library of Scotland – while also carrying out observations and in-depth interviews. Between them, these sites attract some 3m people each year. We received 268 detailed responses to our questionnaires, and combined this with our other research to reach the <a href="https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/media_615337_en.pdf">following conclusions</a>: </p>
<ul>
<li>While audiences like immersive visitor attractions, they particularly like the ones that combine virtual and physical experiences with a strong storyline. The battle experience at Bannockburn works well, for instance, where you play with other people and there’s a member of staff to act as a guide. </li>
<li>When the experience is purely a simulation, audiences like to be able to handle objects at the same time. They can do this at Culloden, for example, where there are certain artefacts at the visitor centre such as 18th-century guns that are available to touch. We found that while people prefer physical objects, even being able to handle virtual objects is better than nothing – the British Museum exhibition allowed visitors to explore objects from different angles, for instance. </li>
<li>Over 55s, which are the core visitor demographic for these kinds of sites, prefer the likes of the reconstructed street and old Glasgow subway at the Riverside to digital simulations. Under 35s are the most comfortable with digital and virtual reality simulations, and also much more likely to want to experience them remotely – something for heritage organisations to think about in future.</li>
<li>Digital simulations are good for getting visitors to stay longer in a small space. This can either maximise the use of space or cause congestion, depending on the popularity of the experience.</li>
<li>We assumed that more visual experiences would need less narrative, but the opposite is actually true. Visitors saw information as important regardless of the mode of delivery.</li>
</ul>
<p>Hopefully these insights will help organisers in this industry to make decisions about what to commission on their sites in future. The clear message is that you can achieve more with immersive experiences if you give people what they want. As virtual and augmented reality increasingly change how we think about these tourist attractions, this will become ever more important in years to come.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110860/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Murray Pittock receives funding from the EPSRC and AHRC. </span></em></p>Want to travel to 1314 and see Robert the Bruce slaying an English knight? Why step this way, madam.Murray Pittock, Bradley Professor of English Literature and Pro Vice-Principal, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/976202018-06-07T08:57:38Z2018-06-07T08:57:38ZHow $6 trillion of fossil fuel investments got dumped thanks to green campaigners<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222026/original/file-20180606-137288-1pi63hh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Protesting in Berlin. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Climate_March_Berlin_-136_(22799793223).jpg#/media/File:Global_Climate_March_Berlin_-136_(22799793223).jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It <a href="http://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/publications/reports/SAP-divestment-report-final.pdf">has become</a> one of the fastest growing political campaigns in human history, surpassing similar battles against the tobacco industry and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Its logic <a href="https://gofossilfree.org/divestment/what-is-fossil-fuel-divestment/">is simple</a>: the only way to avoid climate change and dangerous levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is for most fossil fuel reserves to stay in the ground. </p>
<p>Campaigners launched the fossil fuel divestment campaign in the early 2010s. Their argument was that you curb consumption of fossil fuels if you stop investing in the companies involved in extracting and burning them. Create a significant enough stigma, they argued, and this issue will shoot up the political agenda. </p>
<p>In the past five years or so, investment funds, public institutions and individuals have duly <a href="https://gofossilfree.org/divestment/commitments/">divested</a> around US$6.15 trillion (£4.6 trillion) of fossil fuel assets. It has helped that the campaign attracted a number of prestigious institutions early on, including
the British Medical Association, University College London, University of California, the Church of England and the World Council of Churches (representing more than a half billion Christians globally). </p>
<p>The campaign gained further traction after a London-based think tank <a href="https://www.carbontracker.org/reports/carbon-bubble/">argued that</a> fossil fuels were in any case a bad investment because the true costs of environmental damage had not been priced in and that at some point there would be a severe correction. </p>
<p>The battle is far from over, however, as demonstrated by the recent decision of the Church of Scotland not to divest. One of the cornerstones of European faith, whose teachings have helped shape everyone from Robert Burns to Rupert Murdoch, its annual general assembly held an <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/church-fund-urged-to-drop-oil-vt3wbl7wc">impassioned two-hour debate</a> on whether to remove oil and gas stocks from its £443m investment fund. </p>
<h2>The high road</h2>
<p>The Church of Scotland has form in this regard: it had <a href="http://brightnow.org.uk/news/church-of-scotland-divests-from-coal-and-tar-sands/">already divested</a> its coal and tar sands investments two years earlier. Ahead of the latest debate, its official <a href="https://www.gapublications.co.uk/docs/17_Report-of-Church-and-Society.pdf">general assembly report</a> summarised the issue as follows:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is deeply uncomfortable for the Church, as a caring organisation concerned about climate justice, to continue to invest in something which causes the very harm it seeks to alleviate. </p>
<p>While we have profited from oil and gas exploration in the past, we now understand that financing the future exploration and production will take us away from fulfilling the <a href="https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement">Paris Agreement</a> and delay the transition to a low carbon economy. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222036/original/file-20180606-137318-1x7vmji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222036/original/file-20180606-137318-1x7vmji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222036/original/file-20180606-137318-1x7vmji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222036/original/file-20180606-137318-1x7vmji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222036/original/file-20180606-137318-1x7vmji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222036/original/file-20180606-137318-1x7vmji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222036/original/file-20180606-137318-1x7vmji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222036/original/file-20180606-137318-1x7vmji.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Church of Scotland general assembly.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rowan Gard</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Yet the approximately 1,000 commissioners attending the General Assembly Hall on the city’s Mound, next to Edinburgh Castle, narrowly disagreed: 47% in favour and 53% against. Coming from a nation which <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/renewable-energy-electricity-wind-wave-scotland-climate-change-oil-gas-a8283166.html">already gets</a> most of its electricity from renewable sources, and whose government has indicated the end is in sight for fossil fuel vehicles on the roads, it was undeniably a disappointment. </p>
<p>Representatives were persuaded that it was better to stay invested and seek to influence better behaviour than to pull out altogether. Reverend Jenny Adams, who had brought the motion in the first place, argued that all the evidence suggests oil and gas companies have little intention of changing quickly enough to satisfy the Paris agreement. She said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is a need for climate emissions to peak by 2020 and if we just keep talking, too much time passes and change is not coming fast enough.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She is surely right about this. There may be traditional wisdom in engaging with fellow shareholders and board members on matters pertaining to large companies, but the church’s decision looks naïve in relation to this sector. </p>
<p>To give just one example, consider that approximately 94% of shareholders of the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/shell-shareholders-94-per-cent-emissions-reduction-target-reject-paris-agreement-climate-change-a7751681.html">voted last year</a> and <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/7f945fc4-5dc6-11e8-9334-2218e7146b04">again this year</a> to reject emission targets that would comply with the Paris climate accord, as it was deemed “not in the best interest of the company”. How do you persuade a bloc like that to change its mind?</p>
<h2>Amen corner</h2>
<p>While the Church of Scotland’s decision to sidestep divestment may have been a setback to the movement, there have been recent successes, too. The Church of Ireland <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/social-affairs/religion-and-beliefs/church-of-ireland-to-end-investments-in-fossil-fuel-companies-1.3492315">committed</a> to divest its fossil fuel assets earlier in May, while an international coalition of Catholic institutions, including the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund, <a href="http://www.thenational.scot/news/16175358.35_Catholic_institutions_use_Earth_Day_to_vow_to_stop_funding_fossil_fuels/">pledged</a> in April to divest investments totalling £6.6 billion. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222040/original/file-20180606-137309-hkk4fb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222040/original/file-20180606-137309-hkk4fb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222040/original/file-20180606-137309-hkk4fb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222040/original/file-20180606-137309-hkk4fb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222040/original/file-20180606-137309-hkk4fb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222040/original/file-20180606-137309-hkk4fb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222040/original/file-20180606-137309-hkk4fb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/222040/original/file-20180606-137309-hkk4fb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The movement speaks.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rowan Gard</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Municipal administrations including <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/10/new-york-city-plans-to-divest-5bn-from-fossil-fuels-and-sue-oil-companies">New York</a> and <a href="http://www.climateactionprogramme.org/news/paris-is-considering-suing-the-fossil-fuel-industry">Paris</a> are also divesting from fossil fuels and shifting their investments towards renewable energy sources – evidence that the global divestment is making an impact on public policy. </p>
<p>This certainly seems prudent, as newly published research suggests that the “carbon bubble” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/04/carbon-bubble-could-spark-global-financial-crisis-study-warns">could “burst”</a> in the next two decades as demand for fossil fuel energy falls despite population increases and burgeoning global economic growth. </p>
<p>The study projects that the global fossil energy demand will drop by as much as 40% by 2050. If that comes to fruition, it would mean containing global warming levels to 1.5 °C, which is the aspirational goal of the Paris climate accord. </p>
<p>That would be great news for environmentalists, most especially for those living on the front lines of climate change such as in the Pacific, less so for investors in fossil fuel businesses – Presbyterian or otherwise. It’s a strong signal that this global divestment movement may still be a long way from its peak.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97620/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Rowan Gard has received funding from the European Consortium for Pacific Studies (ECOPAS) funded by the European Union. She is affiliated with 350.org and Friends of the Earth Scotland, and has also volunteered and contributed to divestment campaigns in the US, UK and New Zealand. </span></em></p>Not the sort of amount you’d want to lose down the back of the sofa.Rowan Gard, Environmental Anthropologist, University of St AndrewsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/910202018-03-16T12:31:02Z2018-03-16T12:31:02ZMost Scottish authors want to break up the Union – why don’t they write about it?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210298/original/file-20180314-113458-817acq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Barking. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/black-scotch-terrier-reads-old-books-163255019?src=8p3yLSeW5cSBtDNhrfeyeA-2-81">eAlisa</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Glasgow’s annual book festival, <a href="https://www.ayewrite.com/Pages/default.aspx">Aye Write!</a>, is getting underway. Now in its 11th year, big name writers making appearances include the philosopher AC Grayling, broadcast journalist Robert Peston, crime writer Val McDermid and the mountaineer Chris Bonington. </p>
<p>The name of the festival is a play on “aye right”, a sarcastic Scottish way of saying no. This encapsulates much about the literary outlook in this part of the world – a vernacular defensiveness, a strident overcompensation in the face of imagined English snootiness about Glaswegian speech. A neutral might conclude that the arts in Scotland exist in a state of perma-froth at presumed metropolitan condescension. </p>
<p>If support for Scottish independence can be considered a proxy for such froth, there is certainly much in evidence. At the time of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/events/scotland-decides/results">2014 independence referendum</a>, the Scottish literary scene was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/19/scottish-independence-literature-nationalism">near unanimously</a> in favour of a Yes vote – nowhere close to the 55-45 split among the wider population. </p>
<p>This normally disputatious crowd felt overwhelmingly that the Union was inimical to Scottish culture and that the literary tradition would best flourish with independence. Little has changed since. Don’t expect much enthusiasm from them about Theresa May’s Britain at this year’s festival. </p>
<p>This mood didn’t begin in 2014, it must be said. In the Thatcher-hating days of 1988, the pro-devolution Campaign for a Scottish Assembly <a href="https://thecrownandtheunicorn.wordpress.com/the-claim-of-right-1989/">gave this</a> starkly black and white assessment:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Union has always been, and remains, a threat to the survival of a distinctive culture in Scotland.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is this right? Most great Scottish writers – Robert Burns, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson, for example – thrived within the <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/legislativescrutiny/act-of-union-1707/">Union between</a> Scotland and England. Indeed, most Scots will know much more about their nation’s literature since 1707 than about previous eras. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=837&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210299/original/file-20180314-113462-1j499vn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1052&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bovvered? Robert Louis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-vector/robert-louis-stevenson-vector-illustration-756799360?src=7zAqRQJSVv9GNFEfHCfOHw-1-0">Mario Breda</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If the Union was such a problem for Scottish writers, why was it invisible in what they had to say? Why is there no tradition of anti-Unionist invective? Aside from Burns’s well-known <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/works/344.shtml">1791 poem</a> condemning the “parcel o’ rogues” who “bought and sold” Scotland “for English gold”, the Union is at best an absent presence. Even today it receives little attention from Scottish writers – why? </p>
<h2>Before nationalism</h2>
<p>Scottish literature’s relationship with the Union is the focus of a new book of essays which we have edited, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/literature-and-union-9780198736233?cc=us&lang=en&">Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts</a>. The most compelling explanation for the lack of literary attention to the Union is that until recently, other questions were more important to Scottish writers, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. </p>
<p>In particular, partisanship and religion long trumped national identity. Indeed, they were deeply interwoven, shaping two distinctive mythical representations of Scotland. </p>
<p>One was Presbyterian and democratic, the myth of Scotland’s godly <a href="http://www.covenanter.org.uk/whowere.html">Covenanting</a> tradition. The other was Episcopalian, royalist and Jacobite, the cause of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Forty-five-Rebellion">Forty-five Rising</a>. Each reached back to earlier periods – the Covenanters claimed to be the true heirs of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/articles/scottish_reformation/">Scottish Reformation</a>; Jacobite sympathisers were entranced by the romantic plight of <a href="http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Mary-Queen-of-Scots/">Mary, Queen of Scots</a>, imprisoned and finally beheaded by a Protestant queen. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/novels/waverley.html">Walter Scott’s Waverley</a> (1814) might be the classic example of the Jacobite representation, recounting many of the events of 1745 from a perspective very sympathetic to the Highland rebels. It was followed by a long stream of Jacobite literature – and Scott himself returned to the theme both in <a href="https://theconversation.com/two-centuries-before-marvel-and-star-wars-walter-scotts-rob-roy-was-the-first-modern-anti-hero-89421">Rob Roy</a> (1817) and <a href="http://www.walterscott.lib.ed.ac.uk/works/novels/redgaun.html">Redgauntlet</a> (1824). </p>
<p>Depictions of Covenanters are variously positive and negative in Scottish literature. Many 19th-century novels present them as heroes for their democratic outlook, with their roots in the culture of ordinary folk. John Galt’s <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30749">Ringan Gilhaize</a> (1823) is one example, telling the story of three generations of rural people.</p>
<p>Other writers are repelled by the illiberal and philistine totalitarianism they discern in the tradition. The most notorious example is James Hogg’s 1824 satire, <a href="https://theconversation.com/confessions-of-a-justified-sinner-captures-the-modern-condition-perfectly-46298">The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner</a>, whose lead character considers that having attained his place among God’s saved, he has carte blanche to commit terrible crimes. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=701&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/210300/original/file-20180314-113472-1xsj4pl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hugh McDiarmid.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Nationalism took hold on the Scottish literary scene over the course of the 20th century, primarily under the enduring influence of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=LeCqBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40&dq=Hugh+Macdiarmid+Reformation&source=bl&ots=LPaq_MR_uw&sig=Sq2__1BhbFFocYPjpPXjGayITZk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjK0fSdj8nZAhUYM8AKHYO4AkQQ6AEIOzAC">Hugh MacDiarmid</a>. Even so, he and others held to a view that Scotland’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/articles/scottish_reformation/">Reformation</a> had been just as bad, if not worse, than the Union. For McDiarmid, it was the founding of the Protestant church – and not the merger with England – that was the beginning of the repression of Scottish folk and their authentic culture. </p>
<p>Novels and poems about Covenanting and Jacobitism still abound today. James Robertson, for example, who is <a href="https://www.ayewrite.com/Pages/Whats-On.aspx#/event/de1f87b9-938b-42b2-ab83-a85d00ea01ca">appearing</a> at this year’s Aye Write!, makes sport with Covenanting fanaticism in <a href="https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9781841151892/the-fanatic">The Fanatic</a> (2000) and <a href="http://www.scotgeog.com">The Testament of Gideon Mack</a> (2006). Robertson has also written the only novel that has brought Scottish nationhood into focus in recent years: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/15/and-land-lay-still-robertson">And the Land Lay Still</a> (2010). More generally, the Union remains a submerged and largely invisible feature of the Scottish literary landscape.</p>
<h2>Stark contrasts</h2>
<p>While it is true that the Union never enjoyed much of a fanfare among Scottish writers of previous generations, it was rarely if ever the focus of their work. Several even made conspicuous contributions to British – indeed to English – national identities. How else do we account for the fact that the figure of John Bull was the coinage of a Scottish doctor, <a href="http://www.oxfordscholarlyeditions.com/view/10.1093/actrade/9780198127192.book.1/actrade-9780198127192-book-1">John Arbuthnot</a>, and Rule, Britannia the work of the Scottish poet, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45404/rule-britannia">James Thomson</a>? </p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Sgd9nYqVz2s?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>It is hard to imagine a Scottish writer expressing a similar sentiment in their work today. Yet the reluctance to write about independence has continued, despite writers’ enthusiasm for the cause. It is as if the literary tradition weighs heavy on their shoulders and encourages them to look elsewhere for inspiration. </p>
<p>In sum, the relationship between Scottish literature and the Union turns out to be much more tangled, ironic and surprising than might have been expected. Today’s nationalists do indeed dominate Scotland’s literary scene, and will undoubtedly be in force at Aye Write!, but they do not have all the best tunes. It will be fascinating to see to what extent this changes in future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/91020/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Colin Kidd receives funding from the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland. He is affiliated with These Islands and Scotland in Union. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gerard Carruthers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The politics may have changed over the years, but the literary obsessions of ‘northern Britain’ seem hard to shake.Colin Kidd, Professor of History, University of St AndrewsGerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/905592018-01-24T16:33:46Z2018-01-24T16:33:46ZNan Shepherd: move aside Robert Burns, it’s time to celebrate Scotland’s identity with a woman<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203135/original/file-20180124-72612-1sdgk2j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nan Shepherd on the RBS £5 note.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>The half-light of these weary January days will soon be lit up by the linguistic thrills of <a href="https://www.scotland.org/events/burns-night/the-ultimate-guide-to-burns-night">Burns Night</a>. This international celebration of <a href="http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/robert-burns">Robert Burns’</a> timeless poetry will see millions across the world raise a glass to Scotland’s bard on January 25.</p>
<p>Burns is used by Scots as a frame upon which to hang a tremendous amount of weighty national identity. Upon him they place responsibility as the source of their egalitarian spirit, and of their radicalism. Their socialist leanings too, they expect him to inhabit. Their fondness for a good drink is perhaps the easiest burden for his writing to bear.</p>
<p>As Scotland develops and alters, more and more weight is being borne by this one Ayrshire man. Even his ghost must be growing humpbacked under the strain. Academics and fanatics scratch annually through his letters and works, trying to pin him down as a good unionist, socialist, yes man, Tory. Others look to take him out by labelling him a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/14/poet-robert-burns-sex-pest-says-former-national-poet/?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter">sexual predator</a> or <a href="https://www.scotland.org/features/robert-burns-and-slavery">aspirant slave-owner</a>. This Burnsian battleground shows that Scottish identity can no longer be encompassed in one night nor expressed by one man.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203189/original/file-20180124-72612-1p6wsg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203189/original/file-20180124-72612-1p6wsg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203189/original/file-20180124-72612-1p6wsg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203189/original/file-20180124-72612-1p6wsg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203189/original/file-20180124-72612-1p6wsg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203189/original/file-20180124-72612-1p6wsg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203189/original/file-20180124-72612-1p6wsg5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The work of national poet Robert Burns presents a fairly masculine perspective of Scotland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-illustration/robert-burns-17591796-national-poet-scotland-239399143?src=ycaFyIFYaBFGa9BaKpOSGg-1-1">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Scotland needs a new symbol that can more easily take on the country’s emergent identities. Environmentalism is a huge new concern, as is a real effort to achieve equal status for women. Perhaps the most <a href="https://www.commonground.org.uk/a-wolf-among-wolves/">current debate</a> is the attempt to redefine Scots’ relationship with the <a href="http://www.scotlandinfo.eu/scottish-highlands/">Highlands</a>. These aggressively depopulated regions have inhabited an uncomfortable place in the Scottish psyche, with a romantic, tourist-friendly notion of leaping salmon and noble stags competing with the tragedy of <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/scotland_clearances_01.shtml">the Clearances</a>, when greedy landlords swept crofters from their land in the 18th and 19th centuries in favour of more profitable sheep.</p>
<h2>A woman for the job</h2>
<p>By an incredible stroke of luck, we have just such a poetic hero hung up in a cupboard, ready to be pressed into action: the accomplished Aberdonian novelist and poet, <a href="http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/nan-shepherd">Nan Shepherd</a>, who played a vital role in the 20th-century <a href="https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2013/11/was-there-a-scottish-renaissance/">Scottish Renaissance</a>.</p>
<p>Born in Peterculter and raised in Cults, her existence was forever focused on Aberdeen, as seen through her degree at the city’s university and her <a href="https://news.aberdeencity.gov.uk/aberdeen-to-commemorate-one-of-scotlands-finest-novelists/">long career teaching</a> at the college, and her love for the <a href="https://www.visitscotland.com/see-do/landscapes-nature/national-parks-gardens/cairngorms/">Cairngorm Mountains</a> just inland to the west. From her firm footing in the north-east, she was able to step confidently out into the world both through travel and through addressing universal human questions from a confidently north-east perspective.</p>
<p>Shepherd has already been dusted off and given a relaunch recently. In 2016, the Royal Bank of Scotland used a striking image of the poet wearing a self-made headband, looking proud and confident on its <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/25/nan-shepherd-first-woman-scottish-bank-note">new five-pound note</a>. In 2017, a well-received biography, <a href="http://www.galileopublishing.co.uk/into-the">Into The Mountain</a>, was published, digging down into the life of the woman behind the books.</p>
<p>This foundation has prepared the way for a wide popular embrace. But Scots don’t take someone to their hearts because some well-meaning soul has put out a biography. Nor do they warm to someone purely because they decorate the fivers that glide effortlessly through their fingers.</p>
<p>That’s why alongside Burns, I propose Nan Shepherd Night.</p>
<p>This night would be roughly analogous to Burns’ annual birthday bash in that there would be much discussion of themes and politics and social consequence, well lubricated and studded with readings and song.</p>
<h2>A force of nature</h2>
<p>Raising Shepherd up to this new prominence would give every new generation the chance to interact with one of the most compelling Scots voices of the 20th century. Her work in both Scots and English produced principally in the 1930s spoke to and of a nation in transition. She also wrote of nature in a way that would be intensely valuable for us all to read. In her poem The Hill Burns, she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Wet with the cold fury of blinding cloud,<br>
Through which the snow-fields loom up, like ghosts from a world of eternal annihilation,<br>
And far below, where the dark waters of Etchachan are wont to glint,<br>
An unfathomable void.<br>
Out of these mountains,<br>
Out of the defiant torment of Plutonic rock,<br>
Out of fire, terror, blackness and upheaval,<br>
Leap the clear burns,<br>
Living water,<br>
Like some pure essence of being,<br>
Invisible in itself,<br>
Seen only by its movement.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Her 12-part essay on time spent walking in the Cairngorms, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/20/living-mountain-nan-shepherd-review">The Living Mountain</a>, has been in the spotlight once again since its timely re-release in 2011 by Canongate Books, with a foreword by academic and nature writer <a href="https://www.emma.cam.ac.uk/contact/fellows/?fellow=172">Robert MacFarlane</a>. This slow, revelatory examination of a human immersed in nature is a very powerful piece of writing.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203203/original/file-20180124-72618-1kfdfjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203203/original/file-20180124-72618-1kfdfjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203203/original/file-20180124-72618-1kfdfjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203203/original/file-20180124-72618-1kfdfjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203203/original/file-20180124-72618-1kfdfjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203203/original/file-20180124-72618-1kfdfjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203203/original/file-20180124-72618-1kfdfjh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Nan Shepherd’s beloved Cairngorms.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/loch-morlich-glenmore-forest-cairngorms-northern-721822159?src=VKNTGDAghkw13rJC-7HkTA-1-13">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The slim volume could be easily dispatched in a single sitting, but like one of the walks that ramble from page to page, glen to glen, it can be revisited time and again, with new revelations being provoked, new vistas glimpsed on each fresh journey. As mentioned, Shepherd breaks us, and Scottish literature generally, out of the old dichotomy where the Scottish landscape could only be viewed in one of two ways.</p>
<p>Either Scotland was a misty, ancient place of few people and many romantic notions, or it was a bleakly bare northern extremity from which humans had first scoured clean of the trees then scoured clean of their own ramshackle dwellings and cultures.</p>
<p>Shepherd offers us a third way, a way of approaching the landscape that allows a natural and unmediated relationship to be created between human and landscape, between the two living things.</p>
<h2>Taking her rightful place</h2>
<p>Raising Shepherd up to the height of national figure would at long last put a woman among the pantheon of Scottish greats. Burns, <a href="http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Sir-Walter-Scott/">Scott</a>, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-louis-stevenson">Stevenson</a>, <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/43vprlT8qgGVRYK9VPRmmfw/lewis-grassic-gibbon">Grassic Gibbon</a>, <a href="https://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/2014/09/a-highland-life-remembering-neil-gunn/">Gunn</a>: they all have their place, but they are all men and can only inspire so many of us, and only in so many directions.</p>
<p>A strong, confident female voice being celebrated, read and enjoyed at events around the country with predominantly female speakers would be a welcome antidote to the heavily masculine Burns Night with its conspicuous array of male worthies. Balancing this out would be to the enrichment of both men and women.</p>
<p>Finally, raising Shepherd’s status would undoubtedly also bring the north-east back into focus as one of the cultural heartlands of Scotland. The deep-rooted culture of Scotland’s geographical cold shoulder has often been neglected by those in the <a href="http://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/sndns739">central belt</a>. But while Edinburgh softened itself through Anglicisation, Aberdeen retained its sense of self.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203206/original/file-20180124-72600-1m7b0es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203206/original/file-20180124-72600-1m7b0es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203206/original/file-20180124-72600-1m7b0es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203206/original/file-20180124-72600-1m7b0es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=911&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203206/original/file-20180124-72600-1m7b0es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203206/original/file-20180124-72600-1m7b0es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203206/original/file-20180124-72600-1m7b0es.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1145&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Living Mountain.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Aberdeen University Press</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the north-east, there is a special mentality of hard-headedness and a dark passion for enduring hardship with stoicism – locals proudly call it being “thrawn”. There is the linguistic richness of the local Scots dialect that extends across all classes. There are the rich traditions of fiddle music, ballads and bothy ballads, folktales and legends, high literature and street literature, that inform an ongoing strength of identity and creativity here. Nan Shepherd’s work beautifully illustrates this, and for Scotland’s identity builders in the central belt, a better understanding of Shepherd’s work could act as a bridge to the rich kist of tradition and culture in the north-east.</p>
<p>Shepherd skilfully brings the reader to points of transition and contrast – between hills and sky, modernity and tradition, Scots and English, male and female – walking us through the revelatory landscape, examining it, learning from it. By looking at issues such as class, gender, nature and what it means to be fully alive, Shepherd’s illuminating works equip us to deal with change. In the current climate, that’s not a bad skill to have.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Nan Shepherd was a vital player in the Scots Renaissance of the 20th century, and helped secure Scots’ place as a literary language. As a great makar (poet) in her own right, who used Scots regularly in her work, she also acted as a vital motivator and organiser of others in the movement. Now we are in the midst of another Scots renaissance, and during <a href="https://www.scotslanguage.com/pages/view/id/6">Scots Language Week</a>, it is only fitting that an article championing Shepherd should be written in Scots as well as English.</em></p>
<h2>Shift yersel owre, Rabbie, an mak space fir a national lassie</h2>
<p>Burns Nicht is here aince mair. Aa owre this guid green warld, Scots an their sympathisers will pit oan their best tartan breeks, kilts, sashes an bunnets, an heid for a local dinner.</p>
<p>Ae dey a year we aa breenge oot fae oor hidden neuks, oor mooths aflame wi Burns’ Scots an oor bellies aflame wi strang hielan uisge-beatha. We haver on aboot the values o freedom an equality, resistance tae tyranny, an aa that Scotland stauns fir in this tapsalteerie warld. </p>
<p>Then the next-again dey sees us hingin up aa wir tartan duds, pittin wir Scots tongues back intae the press alang wi oor dirks an kilt soaks. Scotland an aa her Burns-inherited notions safely back in the box unner the bed fir anither year. </p>
<p>Burns is cairtin owre muckle a load fir ae single Ayrshire mannie. An a hail nation sae complex an modren as Scotland needs mair nor ae champion. </p>
<p>Scotland could dae wi a new poetic hero wha could gie voice tae oor new environmentalist impulse, tae the ambition thats mair common nor ever in Scotland tae heize up women tae truly equal status wi men, an tae appreciate the abundant beauties an discovery open tae us in oor hauf-toom glens. </p>
<h2>A quine for the task</h2>
<p>We already hae sic a hero. She’s caaed Nan Shepherd. Nan (Anna) Shepherd wis a gey important pairt o the Scottish Reneaissance o the twentieth century. She wis a braw scriever in her ain richt, plus organiser an communicator an kyther o ideas an concepts. She wis an Aiberdeenshire quine, born intae a faimly fae Peterculter an raised at Cults, she wis aye at hame in the north-east, fae her deys studyin intae Aiberdeen University tae her lang career teachin English at the Aiberdeen College. </p>
<p>She’s aaready been singled-oot fir a bit o a re-launch. Her face appears on the fivers fae the Royal Bank o Scotland, an a new biography o her is oot tae. Unlike Burns, Shepherd redded oot maist o the dodgy stuff fae her diaries, editied her ain letters an even pit a wheen o documents tae the fire afore she deid. Unlike big Rabbie, then, we dinnae hae aa the interestin, incriminatin opinions o the figure tae chaw through an reinterpret. We’re left wi her wark. But thon’s plenty. </p>
<p>Sae this braw brankie new symbol o Scottish identity needs a new National Nicht. Oor ain ane, no tae replace Burns but tae compliment him. A Nicht that shaws the warld whit we are aa aboot these deys an wad gie us leave tae stert oor ain traditions. </p>
<p>That’s how I propone Nan Shepherd Nicht. </p>
<h2>Airt fae the earth</h2>
<p>Explorin Shepherd wad be worthwhile as wad gie ilk new generation a chaunce tae read ane o the best, maist compellin an unique voices o the 20th century. She scrievit poems in baith Scots and English, novels that encompassed life in her north-east hame an celebrated the people, nature an leids that sae define the place, whilst aye haein ae ee on the bigger picture o humanity. </p>
<p>Exploring Shepherd wad gie us a chance tae meditate on oor relationship wi nature. Her maist celebratit wark the dey is <em>The Living Mountain</em>. The non-fiction twal-pairt essay chairts Shepherd’s slaw, revelatory experiences o merchin through the Cairngorms.</p>
<p>This slim buik isnae a chyave tae get through in ae sittin, yet like ane o the rambles Nan taks hersel on, ilk time ye pick it up an hae a read, ye tak new thochts awa, hae new ideas. Shepherd’s unco relationship wi nature braks oot o the auld dichotomy o Scottish literatur. Afore her, the Scots launscape was either a romantic harr-happit laun o bonnie stags an loupin saumon or a harsh, wind-bit wastelaun whaur oor ancestors aince scarted oot a livin afore bein torn fae their hames bi greedy lairds an cruel factors. Shepherd gies us a third wey, whaur ilk human can hae honest communication wi nature an form their ain relations, ootwith aa the fauseness o prejudiced interpretation.</p>
<h2>The Shepherd alangside the Plouman Poet</h2>
<p>Explorin Shepherd wad at lang last pit a female in the pantheon o Scottish greats. Burns, Scott, Stevenson, Grassic Gibbon, Gunn: they aa dae a job fir oor national identity. But they aa dae it fir ae gender. Burns Nichts are gey aften heavy on the male spikkers. Haein a Shepherd Nicht whaur maist spikkers were female wad balance this oot.</p>
<p>Finally, explorin Shepherd wad bring the north-east back intae the fauld o “national” Scotland. This airt has lang been the kist that stores some of Scotland’s richest treisures in terms o cultur, leid, an nature. The hail nation o Scotland could turn, through the wark o Shepherd, tae the north-east an fae its deep kist draw forth wirds hauf-forgot in the sooth, an mentalities that were tint lang-syne. </p>
<p>Sheperd aye brings us tae a transition; atween the taps o hills an the high blue lift, atween modernity an tradition, Scots an English, male an female, an she walks wi us roon it, examinin it, learnin fae it. She equips us tae deal wi change, an in the current dey, thats nae a bad skill tae hae.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90559/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alistair Heather works for the Elphinstone Institute, a part of the University of Aberdeen. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicolas Le Bigre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Scotland’s literary culture is dominated by a male perspective. So as Burns Night approaches, it’s time to give prominence to a female voice – written in both English and Scots.Nicolas Le Bigre, Teaching Fellow, Archivist, Elphinstone Institute, University of AberdeenAlistair Heather, Cultural engagement officer, Elphinstone Institure, University of AberdeenLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/906052018-01-24T12:41:41Z2018-01-24T12:41:41ZRobert Burns was no peasant poet, he was a master of self-promotion<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203219/original/file-20180124-107937-d6541t.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Farmer Schwarmer.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/statue-robert-burns-london-isolated-on-1105220?src=ycaFyIFYaBFGa9BaKpOSGg-1-69">Jacqueline Abremeit</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the Edinburgh World Heritage website’s <a href="https://www.ewht.org.uk/learning/enlightenment-made-easy/the-ploughman-poet---robert-burns-1759-1796-poet-collector-of-songs">story</a> about Scotland’s bard, it notes that when Robert Burns “the ploughman poet” came to the city in 1787, he was “a new boy in town and a great looking heart throb”. It’s a familiar description, dating back to the writer Henry Mackenzie’s <a href="http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk/collections/object_detail/3.2498">review</a> of the iconic Kilmarnock edition of Burns’ poetry in The Lounger for December 1786, describing him as “the heaven-taught ploughman”. </p>
<p>The comparison Mackenzie intends is one with Shakespeare as portrayed by Milton in <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44731/lallegro">L’Allegro</a>, whose “wood-notes wild” derive not from education but from inspiration: Burns is to be for Scotland what Shakespeare was for England. </p>
<p>But it was the ploughman label that stuck. Burns is often seen as a “peasant poet”, aligned with the likes of English writer <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0bnIlgh-9Y4C&pg=PA133&lpg=PA133&dq=peasant+poet+tradition&source=bl&ots=X1QBjTXPRh&sig=VaKU3YYFMFBP9D3p8H6aGEnUBBY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiNyejw2u7YAhUFK8AKHd4gA-IQ6AEIODAD#v=onepage&q=peasant%20poet%20tradition&f=false">John Clare</a> – and he probably wouldn’t have had it any other way. </p>
<h2>Farmer glories</h2>
<p>During his lifetime, Burns <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=elHtMC8Od6cC&pg=PA148&lpg=PA148&dq=Burns+%22unbroke+by+rules+of+Art%22&source=bl&ots=nFp0Rf10fI&sig=QsxcyWfxEuCtkD-VjsRQRPQGrf8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiE_9Hd2-7YAhXDJ8AKHbISAEQQ6AEISTAH#v=onepage&q=Burns%20%22unbroke%20by%20rules%20of%20Art%22&f=false">presented</a> himself as “nature’s bard”, ignorant and free of the “rules of Art”. He walked round Edinburgh in farmer’s boots, portraying a deliberately rustic air. </p>
<p>Yet Burns was well read and reasonably educated: he knew the work of Dryden, Fielding, Goldsmith, Milton, Pope, Sterne and many others. He appears to have been influenced both by <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/read-this-and-blush-naughty-medieval-french-tales">French bawdy poetry</a> and the <a href="http://www.midi-france.info/1904_troubadours.htm">troubadour tradition</a> of Provence. In the preface to his <a href="http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk/collections/object_detail/3.3158">Poems</a> (1786), Burns identifies himself as “obscure” and “nameless”, yet cites Virgil and Theocritus. </p>
<p>And Burns certainly wasn’t living in deprivation. He <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RRn5BgAAQBAJ&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=burns+income+jane+austen&source=bl&ots=iy6m1Hsfk0&sig=Qo84Yrp9wQY5mSk5RzdcRWyZdmg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi-4vK63e7YAhVRW8AKHZRWCYcQ6AEIKTAA">earned</a> much the same from his Edinburgh edition of Poems in 1787 as Adam Smith did from The Wealth of Nations, and in the 1790s his income was as high or higher than Jane Austen’s. It was similar, in fact, to those ministers of the Kirk he liked to bait so much. </p>
<p>He was supported by many wealthy Freemasons. He was the regular correspondent of gentlemen in a strongly class-segregated era, and dined with them. Yet Burns is still often remembered as if he was living on the margins. </p>
<p>This image absolutely suited him: his greatness appeared to be a mystery – and mystery is a lasting source of power. He seemed to have sprung from the soil with no visible means of support. A “celebrity” in the modern sense of a famous person is a 19th-century word: Burns was arguably the first poet to think of himself as a brand. </p>
<h2>Brand Burns</h2>
<p>This self-creation helped to bring him both national and international recognition. In Germany, he came to be seen as both representing the progressive universalism of the radical Enlightenment and a one-stop shop for the folk tradition. </p>
<p>In America he was perceived as the good European, the man of “independent mind” who was a foe to tyrants and an adoptive son of the United States. In the British Empire, he represented the sentiment, communitarianism, egalitarianism and humanitarianism on which many Scots liked to congratulate themselves. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203211/original/file-20180124-72606-121oqlu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203211/original/file-20180124-72606-121oqlu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203211/original/file-20180124-72606-121oqlu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203211/original/file-20180124-72606-121oqlu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203211/original/file-20180124-72606-121oqlu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=839&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203211/original/file-20180124-72606-121oqlu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203211/original/file-20180124-72606-121oqlu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203211/original/file-20180124-72606-121oqlu.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1055&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Comrade Rabbie.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the USSR, he came to be the “good kulak” (peasant) who would have understood the benefits of collective farming, and the Soviets became the first to issue a <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Scotland/comments/4sjmmv/commemorative_stamp_issued_by_the_soviet_union_on/">commemorative stamp</a> for the poet in 1956. </p>
<p>In China during the Cultural Revolution, he represented the lack of contradiction between the agricultural and intellectual; for Kofi Annan in an <a href="http://www.un.org/press/en/2004/sgsm9112.doc.htm">United Nations address</a> in 2004, he was the supreme internationalist, the advocate of harmonious neighbourliness worldwide. </p>
<p>Much of this affection stems from the fact that Burns is in many respects the supreme poet of sentiment, certainly in the Anglophone world. We overlook that his paeans to the routine life of rural poverty are distanced by education: in <a href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/the-cottar%27s-saturday-night/author/burns-robert/">The Cottar’s Saturday Night</a>, he quotes Alexander Pope’s <a href="https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/%7Ejlynch/Texts/windsor.html">Windsor Forest</a>; in <a href="http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/tam-o-shanter-tale">Tam o’ Shanter</a>, he knowingly celebrates sex, drink and dancing in the narrative voice of the Romantic collector of tradition, in a story he invents and sends to such a Romantic collector. </p>
<p>When Burns is knowingly sophisticated, he sometimes appears transparently simple: in Auld Lang Syne the praise of a vanished past, the persisting nature of relationships despite the transience of life, the sugaring of nostalgia, all deflect us from the lack of any promised future. Again we see what we want to see: from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038650/">It’s A Wonderful Life</a> to <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0098635/">When Harry Met Sally</a> and beyond, Hollywood has recognised the song’s extraordinary evocation of sentimental intensity. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Z3sXVxqDbFk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Similarly, people often project a political agenda onto Burns that is hard to justify. In <a href="http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/mouse">To a Mouse</a>, for example, the ploughman does nothing to help the mouse. </p>
<p>Nor is the nature of “Man’s dominion” changed really, despite the ploughman being “sorry” for it. Sorry doesn’t cut the mustard, but the sentiment buttered Burns’s bread and still does worldwide. Most of his supposed politics turns out to be more feeling. </p>
<h2>Supper man</h2>
<p>The other element that has done much for the poet’s reputation is the Burns Supper. The <a href="https://www.scotland.org/features/the-legend-of-the-burns-supper">first</a> was in Alloway in Ayrshire on July 21, 1801 – celebrations switched from his date of death to his birth later, possibly influenced by the adjacent date of dinners on January 24 for the great British Whig <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/history/past-foreign-secretaries/charles-fox">Charles James Fox</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203233/original/file-20180124-107963-1ql2imd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203233/original/file-20180124-107963-1ql2imd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203233/original/file-20180124-107963-1ql2imd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203233/original/file-20180124-107963-1ql2imd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203233/original/file-20180124-107963-1ql2imd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203233/original/file-20180124-107963-1ql2imd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1271&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203233/original/file-20180124-107963-1ql2imd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1271&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203233/original/file-20180124-107963-1ql2imd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1271&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">To a cola.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The custom of the Burns dinner or supper spread rapidly. We see it in London in 1804, India in 1812, New York in 1836, and Copenhagen, Paris and Madrid by 1859. </p>
<p>Today, some nine million people attend official Burns Suppers each year alone, and 100,000 <a href="https://www.scotland.org/features/the-immortal-memory">Immortal Memories</a> are given. <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/7790384.stm">Scotland’s Year of Homecoming</a> was built around Burns in 2009, and in 2018, Scottish Nationalist MSP <a href="http://www.thenational.scot/news/15857173.Robert_Burns_s_value_to_Scotland_debated_at_Holyrood/">Joan McAlpine’s parliamentary motion</a> on Burns’ importance to the Scottish economy gained cross-party support. </p>
<p>Burns has been translated several times as often as Byron; he has more statues than any secular figure except Queen Victoria and Christopher Columbus; and is the only person to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/scotland/5454821/Robert-Burns-becomes-first-person-to-feature-on-Coke-bottle.html">have appeared</a> on a Coca Cola bottle. He’s a synecdoche of the way Scotland wants to be perceived: humane, egalitarian, caring, international. </p>
<p>“O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as ithers see us!” The memory of Robert Burns is indeed immortal. And he knew what he was doing all along.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90605/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Murray Pittock receives funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. </span></em></p>Years before anyone conceived celebrity, the Scottish bard may have been the first to turn himself into a brand.Murray Pittock, Bradley Professor of English Literature, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/902052018-01-24T09:40:49Z2018-01-24T09:40:49Z‘Sex pest’ Robert Burns and the long tradition of poets behaving badly<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203049/original/file-20180123-182962-1t9jwmo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=4%2C32%2C694%2C525&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Scotland's flawed genius, Robert Burns.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_burns.jpg">Alexander Nasmyth</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The poet Liz Lochhead has outed Robert Burns as a “<a href="https://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/robert-burns-was-sex-pest-and-weinstein-of-his-age-1-4661509">sex pest</a>”. While aspects of The Bard of Scotland’s more unsavoury behaviour have long been common knowledge, Lochhead has recently <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lochhead-to-give-up-burns-talks-after-sex-pest-furore-shvc6ffgb">drawn our attention</a> to a 1788 letter written to Bob Ainslie, in which Burns implies that he raped his pregnant girlfriend, Jean Armour. </p>
<p>“It’s very, very Weinsteinian,” she observes. </p>
<p>But why single out Burns? Some of the most acclaimed male poets have done or said many odious things. Among Burns’s peers, we would need to look no further than Samuel Taylor Coleridge (<a href="http://knarf.english.upenn.edu/Coleridg/bio.html">who abandoned his family</a>), William Wordsworth (<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jan/28/featuresreviews.guardianreview35">who abandoned his pregnant French mistress</a>), or a little later on, Lord Byron (<a href="https://wordsworth.org.uk/blog/2016/09/08/byron-and-his-women-mad-bad-and-very-dangerous-to-know/">the most infamous bed-hopper in Europe</a>). </p>
<p>Not so long ago, Derek Walcott <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/may/12/walcott-oxford-poetry-professor">withdrew his candidacy</a> for the professorship of poetry at Oxford when allegations of <a href="http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/6/4/poet-accused-of-harassment-students-in/">sexual misconduct at Harvard</a> were made by a rival, Ruth Padel. Padel, who subsequently won the post, resigned after only a few days when <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ginny-dougary/ruth-padel-on-derek-walco_b_452583.html">her part in the smear campaign</a> was revealed.</p>
<p>In her <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/rabbietoo-burns-letter-boasts-of-sex-attack-on-pregnant-girlfriend-9znmb92vq">comments on Burns’s letter</a>, Lochhead quickly adds that our appreciation of literature does not necessarily go hand in hand with our attitudes towards authors. “Does that mean he isn’t worth reading?” she asks. “It’s not really relevant.” </p>
<p>This is an important point: poetry is not invalidated by our personal views; but our personal views invariably influence our approach to the material. And Burns’s poems also espouse messages of hope and compassion, ideals for which we should continue to strive.</p>
<p>Writers have long made a distinction between poets and their poetry. In an expletive-laden work, Carmen 16: Pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo (which roughly translates as: I will ram my cock up your ass and down your throat), the Roman poet Catullus argued (to use a folksy 1974 <a href="http://www.harvardreview.org/?q=features/lorem-ipsum/down-and-dirty-translations-catullus">translation by Carl Sesar</a>) that “Just the poet’s got to be a boy scout fellas, not his goddamn poems.” </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"952633705876504576"}"></div></p>
<p>But after the #MeToo campaign, it is right that we reappraise our idols. Not only did Burns make Weinsteinian claims in his correspondence, his poetry abounds with physical violence against women. Not published until after his death, <a href="http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Documents/merrymuses.PDF">Merry Muses of Caledonia</a> is stuffed with the bawdiest songs you’re ever likely to read. Burns’s authorship remains uncertain, but it’s likely that he wrote or rewrote many of the pieces included therein. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zwk23">The Yellow, Yellow Yorlin</a> is deeply unsettling, despite its jaunty rhythm:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>But I took her by the waist, an’ laid her down in haste,<br>
For a’ her squakin’ an’ squalin’;<br>
The lassie soon grew tame, an’ bade me come again<br>
For to play wi’ her yellow, yellow yorlin’.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Seize the day</h2>
<p>A seemingly softer but no less pernicious form of sex pesting can be found in the “carpe diem” tradition – “seize the day”, the poets beg of reluctant virgins.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203051/original/file-20180123-182965-1sv5dli.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203051/original/file-20180123-182965-1sv5dli.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/203051/original/file-20180123-182965-1sv5dli.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203051/original/file-20180123-182965-1sv5dli.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203051/original/file-20180123-182965-1sv5dli.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=583&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203051/original/file-20180123-182965-1sv5dli.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203051/original/file-20180123-182965-1sv5dli.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/203051/original/file-20180123-182965-1sv5dli.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=732&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Andrew Marvell: anything but coy.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Andrew_Marvell_Sketch.jpg">Ruralhistorian</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Carpe diem poetry upholds different forms of abuse, whether we mean nagging coercion or outright violence. The most famous work in this mode remains Andrew Marvell’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44688/to-his-coy-mistress">To His Coy Mistress</a>. </p>
<p>Read in the light of the #MeToo campaign, the victim shaming laid out right from the start draws an uncomfortable parallel with Adrienne Rich’s more <a href="http://noteasybeingred.tumblr.com/post/12169326436/rape-by-adrienne-rich">recent poem Rape</a> (“you are guilty of the crime / of having been forced”). Marvell writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Had we but world enough and time,<br>
This coyness, lady, were no crime.<br>
We would sit down, and think which way<br>
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Marvell’s speaker assumes his female companion is ripe for sex – with him – merely because she is young and beautiful:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Now therefore, while the youthful hue<br>
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,<br>
And while thy willing soul transpires<br>
At every pore with instant fires,<br>
Now let us sport us while we may,<br>
And now, like amorous birds of prey,<br>
Rather at once our time devour<br>
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To bring in another major example, Sir Thomas Wyatt’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45593/whoso-list-to-hunt-i-know-where-is-an-hind">Whoso List to Hunt</a> recounts the tale of the speaker’s vain pursuit of a deer (a symbolic representation of Anne Boleyn), who belongs to Caesar (namely Henry VIII):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is written, her fair neck round about:<br>
<em>Noli me tangere</em>, for Caesar’s I am,<br>
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Boleyn and Wyatt might have been lovers in real life – but, in any case, the language of domination sits uneasily after Weinstein. Against this we might place Aphra Behn’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43639/the-disappointment">The Disappointment</a>, in which coercion into sexual activity is deftly exposed as a trick perpetuated by male poets:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Cloris returning from the Trance<br>
Which Love and soft Desire had bred,<br>
Her tim'rous Hand she gently laid,<br>
Or guided by Design or Chance,<br>
Upon that Fabulous Priapus,<br>
That Potent God (as Poets feign.)</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>She felt no pain</h2>
<p>Few poems are as violent as Robert Browning’s <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46313/porphyrias-lover">Porphyria’s Lover</a>. This dramatic monologue captures with creeping dread the paranoid delusions of a bullying lover. The unnamed speaker eventually kills Porphyria with her own body:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>That moment she was mine, mine, fair,<br>
Perfectly pure and good: I found<br>
A thing to do, and all her hair<br>
In one long yellow string I wound<br>
Three times her little throat around,<br>
And strangled her. No pain felt she;<br>
I am quite sure she felt no pain.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That pause for thought at the end is especially chilling – any sense of concern for the victim is a fleeting afterthought. </p>
<p>In <a href="http://www.poetry-archive.com/m/the_rape_of_aurora.html">The Rape of Aurora</a>, another Victorian poet, George Meredith, more patently eroticises sexual violence:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Her limbs richly blushing,<br>
She lay sweetly wailing,<br>
In odours that gloomed<br>
On the God as he bloomed<br>
O'er her loveliness paling.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By contrast, the 20th-century Irish poet W B Yeats simultaneously captures the devastation of the victim (a girl named Leda) and the callousness of the perpetrator (Zeus disguised as a swan) with extraordinary concision in <a href="https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/leda-and-swan">Leda and the Swan</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So mastered by the brute blood of the air,<br>
Did she put on his knowledge with his power<br>
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many poems depict violence against women, typically in symbolic terms. Often the language is deeply personal. Often it is brutally inhumane. Confessional or callous, tragic or satirical, representations of rape have long been rife in Western literature. </p>
<p>Poets are not always good people – they’re <em>people</em>, after all. But their works always ask us to consider human concerns. After Weinstein, the time is right to reevaluate how we respond to literary traditions. Rather than using literature (or private correspondence) to out so-called sex pests, though, we can use it as a vehicle for understanding the long history of sex pesting.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/90205/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Daniel Cook receives funding from the AHRC, The Leverhulme Trust, and The Royal Society of Edinburgh.</span></em></p>Poetry has a long history of depicting violent sexual behaviour against women.Daniel Cook, Senior Lecturer in English, University of DundeeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/789682017-06-07T13:55:46Z2017-06-07T13:55:46ZRemembering the lost father of American science fiction – and his Scottish roots<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172542/original/file-20170606-3668-14b941a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Happy birthday, RDM. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Scotland is rarely slow to recognise its literary heroes, from building monuments to <a href="https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/directory_record/5052/scott_monument">Walter Scott</a> to crafting a tourist industry around <a href="https://www.visitscotland.com/info/see-do/the-burns-heritage-trail-p331221">Robert Burns</a>. However, one major writer remains unclaimed for the canon 130 years after his literary career began.</p>
<p>Robert Duncan Milne was an astonishingly prescient pioneer of science fiction who published over 60 stories in the late 19th century. Yet hardly anyone knows his name or how he influenced other leading lights in the early days of the genre. </p>
<p>HG Wells’s <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/55966/the-time-machine/">The Time Machine (1895)</a> is famously associated with visualising time travel as if watching a series of sped-up moving photographic images, for example, firing the imaginations of the earliest film makers. Yet Milne published a whole string of stories about fantastic technologies for visual time-travelling years earlier. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172540/original/file-20170606-3662-13a3jlg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172540/original/file-20170606-3662-13a3jlg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172540/original/file-20170606-3662-13a3jlg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172540/original/file-20170606-3662-13a3jlg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172540/original/file-20170606-3662-13a3jlg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172540/original/file-20170606-3662-13a3jlg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172540/original/file-20170606-3662-13a3jlg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172540/original/file-20170606-3662-13a3jlg.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Milne anthology.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.lwcurrey.com/pages/books/152913/sam-moskowitz-robert-duncan-milne/science-fiction-in-old-san-francisco-history-of-the-movement-from-1854-to-1890-and-into-the-sun-other">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He also foresaw television, remote surveillance, mobile phones and worldwide satellite communications – not to mention climate change, scientific terrorism and drone warfare, cryogenics and molecular re-engineering of the body. </p>
<p>The American science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz, who published the <a href="https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/author/moskowitz-sam-and-robert-duncan-milne/">only posthumous anthology</a> of Milne’s work in 1980, credited him as being, in effect, the first full-time sci-fi writer in America. </p>
<h2>Milne reaches America</h2>
<p>Milne was born in the small Fife town of Cupar in 1844, the son of a Kirk minister. He was a gifted classics scholar who nevertheless left Oxford without graduating in the 1860s before mysteriously reappearing in California, then the literal Wild West of world-changing new ideas and inventions. </p>
<p>After Jack London-esque stints as an itinerant shepherd, cook and labourer, the aspiring inventor and writer resurfaced at San Francisco’s 1874 Mechanics’ Fair, demonstrating a rotary engine that he had patented. Thenceforth, his scientific articles and fiction appeared regularly in San Francisco’s <a href="http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/96644495/">Argonaut magazine</a> until the 1890s. </p>
<p>The Milne story that presaged HG Wells’ visualisation of time travel is one of his most remarkable, The Palaeoscopic Camera: How Dead Walls Reveal the Scenes and Secrets of the Past (1881). It is a fictional take on one of San Francisco’s most famous citizens, the pioneering photographer <a href="http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk">Eadweard Muybridge</a>. Muybridge’s animal locomotion studies used the camera as a machine to see movements too fast for the naked eye and reanimated them by projection, inspiring the <a href="http://www.earlycinema.com/technology/cinematographe.html">invention of the cinematograph</a> in 1895 by the Lumières. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172544/original/file-20170606-3707-1flj7s7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172544/original/file-20170606-3707-1flj7s7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172544/original/file-20170606-3707-1flj7s7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172544/original/file-20170606-3707-1flj7s7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172544/original/file-20170606-3707-1flj7s7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=372&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172544/original/file-20170606-3707-1flj7s7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172544/original/file-20170606-3707-1flj7s7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172544/original/file-20170606-3707-1flj7s7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=467&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Muybridge motion.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Horse_in_Motion.jpg#/media/File:The_Horse_in_Motion.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Milne seized the idea that photography can reveal things in time and reimagined Muybridge’s process as a fantastic technology that can unearth events from the remote past and replay them as moving images in the present. Thus he anticipated cinema as a medium for visual time travelling years before Wells or the Lumières. As he wrote in the story:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Scene succeeded scene with such exact and wondrous alternation of form and subject that my attention was spell-bound, and I scarcely knew whether I was gazing at reality or not. Color, form, expression of countenance, habitude of dress, demeanor, gesture – all were there, limned to the life.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Milne was read widely in the US and syndicated round the world – though rarely if ever in his native Scotland, alas. His cryogenics story, Ten Thousand Years in Ice, in which a survivor from an ancient advanced civilisation is revived in the present, unintentionally became one of science fiction’s great literary hoaxes. Because of the documentary plausibility which became Milne’s trademark style, readers of a Hungarian newspaper mistook the translation for a factual report. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172743/original/file-20170607-29597-1syudn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172743/original/file-20170607-29597-1syudn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/172743/original/file-20170607-29597-1syudn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172743/original/file-20170607-29597-1syudn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172743/original/file-20170607-29597-1syudn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=625&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172743/original/file-20170607-29597-1syudn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172743/original/file-20170607-29597-1syudn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/172743/original/file-20170607-29597-1syudn0.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=785&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Moskowitz illustration for Ten Thousand Years in Ice.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://theconversation.com/how-to-get-the-most-out-of-opinion-polls-without-being-led-up-the-garden-path-78846">Sam Moskowitz</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This anticipated the “realism of the fantastic” associated with The War of the Worlds. The 1938 radio adaptation <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15470903">notoriously panicked</a> listeners in America by transferring such techniques into broadcast media. </p>
<h2>Future vision</h2>
<p>Though generally enthralled by scientific wonders, Milne’s narrators, like Wells’, are not simply gung-ho optimists about technological progress. They often sound cautionary notes about the double-edged potential of new inventions or processes to disrupt human life or be turned to sinister ends.</p>
<p>In The Eidoloscope, for example, Milne discusses the possibility of being able to replay any action or event from the past on a kind of monitor. It raises concerns about universal surveillance and an end to privacy altogether. </p>
<p>And in A Question of Reciprocity, he proposes being able to steer unmanned aircraft by remote control. He signals how destructive this might be in the wrong hands when a helicopter armed with bombs is used to blackmail the citizens of San Francisco.</p>
<p>Indeed through his writing, Milne created countless imaginary technologies. Some were close to feasibility at the time, but others were way ahead. These ideas, taken on by scientists, engineers and technologists, have fundamentally shaped the networked media-driven world we now live in.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173262/original/file-20170610-4800-mywxqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173262/original/file-20170610-4800-mywxqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/173262/original/file-20170610-4800-mywxqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173262/original/file-20170610-4800-mywxqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173262/original/file-20170610-4800-mywxqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=598&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173262/original/file-20170610-4800-mywxqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173262/original/file-20170610-4800-mywxqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/173262/original/file-20170610-4800-mywxqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=751&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Milne cartoon by Elliot Balson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Elliot Balson</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ironically, scientific modernity cut Milne’s own extraordinary career short. A high-functioning alcoholic, his life was terminated on December 15 1899 when he stumbled in front of one of San Francisco’s new electric street cars. Thereafter his reputation was virtually buried with him. He had never gathered his work together into a published volume in his lifetime and no one thought to do so until Moskowitz decades later.</p>
<p>My colleagues and I at the University of Dundee are now teaching Milne on our MLitt Science Fiction course and developing a major research project about him. This will include a new critical anthology, a graphic novel about his life and career, and a comic book retelling his stories in visual form. We are indebted for Milne’s rediscovery to Barry Sullivan, a postgraduate student.</p>
<p>It is not going too far to say Milne is the missing link between Scotland and the origins of modern science fiction. June 7 was his birthday. I believe the time has come to finally honour this transatlantic science fiction prophet in his homeland. </p>
<p>A plaque in Cupar would be a great start, but more importantly this writer deserves to be much more widely read. Scotland should be looking at ways of giving him the recognition he deserves. Milne should be one of the first dozen or so writers that we think of when we consider Scotland’s literary heritage. Until then, his country is doing itself a great disservice – not to mention the man himself.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78968/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Keith Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Robert Duncan Milne made HG Wells struggle to keep up.Keith Williams, Senior Lecturer in English, University of DundeeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/753522017-03-31T13:59:23Z2017-03-31T13:59:23ZScotland’s dazzling visitor attraction numbers are not quite what they seem<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163348/original/image-20170330-4555-xzi1n8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Castles in the air?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.paimages.co.uk/search-results/fluid/?q=edinburgh%20castle&category=A,S,E&fields_0=all&fields_1=all&imagesonly=1&orientation=both&text=edinburgh%20castle&words_0=all&words_1=all">Jane West/PA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Scotland’s visitor attractions are outstripping those in the rest of the UK, <a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/15183071.National_Museum_of_Scotland_tops_visitor_attractions_in_Scotland_as_nation_outperforms_UK/">according to</a> a new report. They <a href="http://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=403&codeid=789">recorded</a> a whopping 15.6% increase in visitor numbers between 2015 and 2016 compared to an overall UK increase of 7.2% – growing faster <a href="http://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=453&codeid=777">for the</a> third <a href="http://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=453&codeid=756">year in a row</a>. </p>
<p>Led by big increases from Scotland’s two top visitor attractions, Edinburgh Castle (+13%) and the city’s National Museum (+16%), the Scottish government hailed the 2016 figures as outstanding news. Fiona Hyslop, the tourism secretary, said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The success of our leading visitor attractions will continue to play a vital role in making Scotland a destination of first choice for visitors from the UK and across the world. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unquestionably Scotland has a great range of visitor attractions. “Must-sees” include the <a href="https://www.visitscotland.com/info/towns-villages/glenfinnan-p236571">Glenfinnan Viaduct</a> on the West Highland railway line, made world famous by the Harry Potter films. Then there are battlefields such as nearby <a href="http://www.nts.org.uk/Visit/Culloden">Culloden</a>, where the Jacobites met their <a href="https://theconversation.com/culloden-why-truth-about-battle-for-britain-lay-hidden-for-three-centuries-62398">most famous defeat</a> to British troops in 1745. Not to mention the scores of whisky distilleries in some of the most beautiful settings in the country. </p>
<p>Yet the new figures, published by the <a href="http://www.alva.org.uk">Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (ALVA)</a>, look remarkably high to me – especially compared to other key sources. On closer examination, they are exaggerating the reality for Scottish visitor attractions as a whole. </p>
<h2>Who counts what</h2>
<p>ALVA <a href="http://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=607">only counts</a> 51 Scottish visitor attractions as members out of a total of more than 1,280. Membership criteria require 1m visitors per year and for each site to be considered among the “most popular, iconic and important attractions”. Of the six Scottish attractions that receive 1m annual visitors on their own, only five are ALVA members: the National Museum, Edinburgh Castle, the city’s Scottish National Gallery and Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Riverside Museum. The sixth, St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, is not included. </p>
<p>The remaining Scottish ALVA sites make the count by collectively attracting more than 1m as part of organisations such as the National Trust for Scotland, which includes the likes of Culloden and Ayrshire attractions Culzean Castle and Robert Burns’ Birthplace – or the Royal Collection Trust, which includes the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Queen’s official residence in Edinburgh. </p>
<p>Look down the ALVA list and you find most attractions located in Scottish cities, with some significant omissions. These include <a href="https://www.visitscotland.com/info/see-do/the-falkirk-wheel-p248061">the Falkirk Wheel</a>, which attracts more than half a million visitors per year, and the <a href="http://www.royalyachtbritannia.co.uk">Royal Yacht Britannia</a> in Edinburgh, which attracts more than 300,000. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163365/original/image-20170330-4551-1rj6tyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163365/original/image-20170330-4551-1rj6tyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163365/original/image-20170330-4551-1rj6tyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163365/original/image-20170330-4551-1rj6tyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163365/original/image-20170330-4551-1rj6tyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163365/original/image-20170330-4551-1rj6tyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163365/original/image-20170330-4551-1rj6tyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163365/original/image-20170330-4551-1rj6tyh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=477&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Burns’ cottage in Alloway, Ayrshire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pikerslanefarm/14142907668/in/photolist-nxL6HE-dohTty-RXQzK8-gTWb3A-dohVPs-ec5XyP-ecbC3o-dohU17-ed2868-gTW86q-ec5XiR-ecbBYo-ecbCpA-ed1Emg-ed1Eyp-dohNxk-oBymZm-nS3ija-nQcoty-nQfMZB-6EYmUp-4DP4ch-5vWsRL-4DJMjF-nQcawG-nQ6EcY-dohVeN-gTWtTs-ed1E9c-gTX9xt-dohLMk-dohVUW-dohKYZ-dohWc9-dohMzp-ed7iyf-gTWd5y-dohMjM-oDnoAq-dohVJm-gTWrQ7-dohW3C-dohUmf-dohM6p-dohVxj-dohUS7-gTXcdP-dohUMd-gTWUQD-uCQKK1">Amanda Slater</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The other key source of annual visitor numbers is the <a href="https://www.asva.co.uk">Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions (ASVA)</a>. With less limiting membership criteria, it currently has 450 members. Its survey includes 249 sites and also monitors visitor spending and associated activities. </p>
<p>The ASVA 2016 report, which is not publicly available, recorded an overall increase in Scottish visitor numbers of 6%. It still shows increases across all regions, particularly in sectors such as heritage and distilleries – though these inevitably mask a more complex picture. Some non-ALVA members are up more than 10% a year, while others experienced small drops – Edinburgh Zoo, for example. </p>
<h2>The underlying story</h2>
<p>So why the big difference in overall growth between the two sets of figures? Many of Scotland’s smaller attractions have not been performing as well as the big-ticket draws, even if they have still been growing. Having said that, the ASVA numbers are a more reliable and representative guide to the overall performance. </p>
<p>All attractions are vulnerable to vagaries such as new exhibitions, temporary closures, improvements in visitor counting tools – and weather and road developments. Because ALVA focuses on a smaller number of sites, such one-offs are more likely to distort the figures. To give one example, the National Museum’s 2016 numbers have been flattered because, after a <a href="http://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=605">7% drop in 2014</a> and <a href="http://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=605">4% drop in 2015</a> owing to ten galleries being closed for redevelopment, they reopened in 2016, bringing in more visitors. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163366/original/image-20170330-4578-6devqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163366/original/image-20170330-4578-6devqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/163366/original/image-20170330-4578-6devqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163366/original/image-20170330-4578-6devqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163366/original/image-20170330-4578-6devqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163366/original/image-20170330-4578-6devqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163366/original/image-20170330-4578-6devqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/163366/original/image-20170330-4578-6devqt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Inside the National Museum of Scotland.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/su1droot/7398426654/in/photolist-cgLSuf-aLwvH8-94aMZ1-pwqfva-qqzcNB-cUAesW-bdWwke-jDxTzb-aDZGaS-jDxqTn-ajnVce-dVTZr6-jDz5mE-ajqGsU-aLwNvc-jDxjSL-amhRAe-bsFnTm-mZu8eB-bFi59F-RciJgT-a4VotW-RzbP7h-ikQGop-cXiybQ-gyfRzX-5Hufvr-gqee8N-apHUYM-a9jaCU-puomDi-atKC2y-bV29xG-cgLQ4C-7nxwm4-cgLRRm-dVZzF7-jDz3EU-knMd8z-fmZjHL-jDv71Z-jDy857-dPuYVD-s44zPV-jDziWL-cdtVUJ-jA6WYV-jDxnHf-a4VoaL-8m4aAz">Ben Mason</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Ignoring the smaller attractions also misses an economic contribution that is more important than it may first appear. Cumulatively these sites help to differentiate a destination, in some cases by offering <a href="http://stars.library.ucf.edu/rosenscholar/444/">special interest experiences</a>. They help bring socioeconomic benefits to community hotels, shops and other businesses, <a href="http://www.coris.uniroma1.it/sites/default/files/14.28.24_Visitor%20attractions%20and%20events%20Responding%20to%20seasonality.pdf">particularly</a> out of season. </p>
<p>If we go by the ASVA numbers, Scotland’s visitor attractions still compare well to other parts of the UK. VisitBritain’s 2015 survey of 1,459 English sites, the most recent available, <a href="https://www.visitbritain.org/annual-survey-visits-visitor-attractions-latest-results">showed 2% growth</a> compared to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-35690252">3.4% growth</a> for Scottish attractions the same year – a modest but noticeable difference, albeit that most of the <a href="http://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=423">UK’s biggest attractions</a> are still south of the border. The number one ranked British Museum’s 6.4m annual visits far outdoes the National Museum of Scotland’s 1.8m, predominantly due to the volume of visitors and residents in the London area. </p>
<p>All UK tourism has benefited from <a href="http://www.ukinbound.org/about/inbound-tourism">more inbound visitors</a>, but Scottish visitor attractions have also seen substantial <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/news/scottish-tourist-attractions-see-15-rise-in-visitor-numbers-1-4404265">capital investment programmes</a> and collaborate well on training and sharing best practice via member organisations such as ASVA. Scotland has also seen national campaigns like VisitScotland’s <a href="https://www.visitscotland.com/about/themed-years/history-heritage-archaeology/">Year of History, Heritage and Archaeology 2017</a>; plus <a href="http://www.visitscotland.org/research_and_statistics/tourism_sectors/film_tourism.aspx">film/TV tourism</a> from the likes of Harry Potter and <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3006802/">Outlander</a>. Extra air routes and <a href="https://www.transport.gov.scot/public-transport/ferries/road-equivalent-tariff/">cheaper ferry prices</a> have also helped. </p>
<p>Tourism businesses have also been getting more customer friendly, introducing longer opening hours, better pricing packages and sharper attempts to target millenials – <a href="http://www.nms.ac.uk/about-us/press-office/museum-late-celts/">music nights</a> at the National Museum for example. Scotland is also seen as safer for tourists than the UK – <a href="http://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/crime/edinburgh-wins-title-of-uk-s-safest-destination-1-3536909">Edinburgh was voted</a> the country’s safest destination in 2014, for example. </p>
<p>So while the growth of Scotland’s visitor attractions may not be quite as frothy as the ALVA figures suggest, it’s far from disappointing. Indeed, ASVA records a very respectable 16% increase overall since 2013. However welcome the surge at the biggest attractions, this looks like a steady and gradual increase that can be sustained into the future. That is a story well worth telling in its own right.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/75352/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Leask does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Are Edinburgh Castle et al really acing their English equivalents?Anna Leask, Professor of Tourism Management, Edinburgh Napier UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/718392017-01-24T16:08:25Z2017-01-24T16:08:25ZHow nervy elites seized Robert Burns before radicals got there<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154076/original/image-20170124-16089-cq2uov.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dundee's Burns memorial. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/tourscotland/6512281257/in/photolist-8xXceg-urgoU-Le9dL-8KhwZi-bdSmKH-nQfHf6-gYRQGw-8ZBmP-aVt9kk-k333UV-4pwEPc-bdSr5p-urbpu-nAXcLJ-bdSsmi-atwWPw-z4ggnS-9EgHPJ-9PXGeH-9e92ie-qBUdRq-74cq8W-dZWo8h-5tCRGp-gWHpTk-dq16vk-aVt8wr-bdSphg-fvdRC5-6RkVGa-nFT3kV-9XJKZk-9fb1Uy-6Xa6Hp-7d3Pi2-uphUx-dSomFR-64TKPj-KeDDN-4Fn4Zv-92Cdot-urcN4-paWq1H-dv4fJa-bqCo6-7PvAaD-G7s6Nr-bmUgco-bdSjY2-9ea6ev">Sandy Stevenson</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Two hundred years ago the bones of Robert Burns were <a href="http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/dumfries/burnsmausoleum/">dug up</a> along with the coffin in which he had been laid to rest in 1796 in Dumfries in south-west Scotland. This was in preparation for the re-interment of Scotland’s national poet beneath a mausoleum being built as a more fitting memorial. </p>
<p>The workmen present <a href="http://www.dumfriesmuseum.demon.co.uk/mausoleum.html">stood</a> bare-headed in the cramped graveyard of St Michael’s church, “their frames thrilling with some indefinable emotion, as they gazed on the ashes of him whose fame is as wide as the world itself”. Barely two decades after his death, Burns had already become a secular saint. </p>
<p>Yet his legacy was still very much up for grabs at the time – unlike today. Now that it is time once again to toast Burns’ immortal memory on January 25, both in Scotland and around the world, how does our perception of him now compare to then? And how did Burns make the journey from Edinburgh drawing rooms at the turn of the 18th century to his global superstardom today?</p>
<h2>The battle for Burns</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154071/original/image-20170124-16066-1qxqqm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154071/original/image-20170124-16066-1qxqqm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154071/original/image-20170124-16066-1qxqqm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154071/original/image-20170124-16066-1qxqqm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154071/original/image-20170124-16066-1qxqqm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154071/original/image-20170124-16066-1qxqqm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154071/original/image-20170124-16066-1qxqqm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154071/original/image-20170124-16066-1qxqqm1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Burns mausoleum.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Robert_Burns_Mausoleum,_Dumfries.jpg#/media/File:Robert_Burns_Mausoleum,_Dumfries.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Dumfries mausoleum was the first of numerous Burns memorials that <a href="http://www.birlinn.co.uk/Immortal-Memory.html">studded</a> the towns of lowland Scotland by the end of the Victorian era. Most were statues, erected in an informal race between Scotland’s urban elites to have one. Overseas, above all in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand, Scots settlers and their descendants soon followed suit. Why? </p>
<p>The answer is far from straightforward. The sentimental appeal of Burns’ writing was part of it; his preservation in verse of a rural Scotland that was fast disappearing. But alone this will not do. It doesn’t explain why from the time of his death onwards, his legacy has been fought over. </p>
<p>Much has to do with establishment fears about where the cult of Burns might lead. Terrified by the prospect of revolution and radical violence in Scotland inspired by songs such as <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/works/496.shtml">A Man’s a Man</a>, his first editors elided poems and sections of them that were toxic in their assertion of human dignity regardless of rank, title or wealth. </p>
<figure>
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<p>Tories in Scotland and further south then quickly adopted the poet, recognising the same danger. The likes of <a href="http://spartacus-educational.com/PRsidmouth.htm">Lord Sidmouth</a>, <a href="http://www.portaltothepast.co.uk/index.aspx?articleid=3319">Professor Charles Wilson</a> and the <a href="http://thepeerage.com/p2158.htm">Earl of Eglinton</a> promoted poems such as <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/poems/the_cotters_saturday_night.shtml">The Cotter’s Saturday Night</a> as a model of stoicism and Presbyterian piety for the country’s rural poor to abide by. </p>
<p>By the mid-19th century this championing of Burns had spread to the newly ascendant manufacturing and commercial classes and artisans. Disciples of the Scottish reformer <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Samuel-Smiles">Samuel Smiles</a>, they urged working people to emulate the bard on the grounds of his belief in independent living. He was seen as a credible example of how with hard work and the grace of God success and fame could be achieved – earning him the <a href="http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/The-heaven-taught-ploughman-8184">moniker</a> the “heaven-taught ploughman”. </p>
<p>Other sections of Scottish society had other designs on Burns by then. Moderate Presbyterians and non-believers <a href="http://www.birlinn.co.uk/Immortal-Memory.html">drew on</a> anti-clerical satires such as <a href="http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/holy_willie.htm">Holy Willie’s Prayer</a> to help liberate the people from the nation’s theocrats, the inheritors of John Knox’s <a href="http://reformationhistory.org/johnknox.html">Reformation</a>. By the later Victorian era Burns was <a href="http://www.birlinn.co.uk/Immortal-Memory.html">becoming</a> a socialist icon, leading the way for communists to <a href="http://socialistunity.com/the-people%E2%80%99s-poet-robert-burns-1759-1796/">commandeer him</a> in the 20th century. </p>
<p>But on one issue there was no conflict. The most remarkable day in Scotland’s social history was January 25, 1859, the centenary of Burns’ birth. Without precedent, work in every city and town and hamlet ceased and celebrations were held. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154070/original/image-20170124-16062-rq52oq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154070/original/image-20170124-16062-rq52oq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/154070/original/image-20170124-16062-rq52oq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154070/original/image-20170124-16062-rq52oq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154070/original/image-20170124-16062-rq52oq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154070/original/image-20170124-16062-rq52oq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154070/original/image-20170124-16062-rq52oq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/154070/original/image-20170124-16062-rq52oq.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=530&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Burns centenary celebrations in Dumfries.</span>
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<p>The reason is clear. As The Scotsman <a href="http://www.birlinn.co.uk/Immortal-Memory.html">reminded</a> its readers at the time, the “chief characteristic of Burns was his Nationality … he was utterly and intensely, before and beyond everything, a Scotchman”. </p>
<p>There were those who believed Burns had rescued Scotland from oblivion – above all through his work as a collector, adaptor and writer of Scottish song, the nation’s genetic code. If Scots felt alienated within a union in which England was politically and culturally dominant, Burns offered them a sense of pride and self-respect that in turn fuelled the emerging <a href="http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/07/31/ehr.ceu209.full">Home Rule movement</a>.</p>
<h2>Scotland the what?</h2>
<p>Burns’ legacy as a moving force in Scotland’s history has now dissolved. He has become a malleable symbol of the nation, functioning partly as a tourist attraction whose familiar face can sell shortbread, whisky, ales and tea towels. As usual, nationalists and unionists and other factions will claim him as one of their own – but mainly by judicious selection from his works and no little credibility stretching. </p>
<p>At the best of the Burns suppers, attendees will be reminded that Burns spoke for no one party. He spoke for humanity itself, warts and all. Right now, in the wake of Brexit and the inauguration of President Trump, that is precisely why he is still worth reading.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/71839/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Christopher A Whatley is the author of Immortal Memory: Burns and the Scottish People (2016, Birlinn/John Donald).</span></em></p>Scotland’s national poet was seen as having the potential to stir up revolutionary sentiment in the 19th century.Christopher A Whatley, Professor of Scottish History, University of DundeeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/659002016-09-22T14:38:20Z2016-09-22T14:38:20ZThe songs of Robert Burns: how we recreated what they originally sounded like<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/138794/original/image-20160922-22530-142s974.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Alexander Nasmyth's Robert Burns, 1828. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Burns#/media/File:Alexander_Nasmyth_-_Robert_Burns,_1759_-_1796._Poet_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ae Fond Kiss, Auld Lang Syne, O My Love’s Like a Red, Red Rose – all celebrated Robert Burns songs. Many Scots will have a favourite performance, too: maybe <a href="http://www.eddireader.co.uk/music/the-songs-of-robert-burns-deluxe-edition">Eddie Reader’s</a> characterful renditions or <a href="https://songoftheisles.com/tag/dick-gaughan/">Dick Gaughan’s</a> more epic performances or <a href="http://es.redmp3.su/versii-pesni/3988045.20610250.21672679.23197409.23628040.24257971.28291222.20450476/kenneth-mckellar-ae-fond-kiss.html">Kenneth McKellar’s</a> White Heather Club interpretations. </p>
<p>Yet none of these are as the songs would have sounded towards the end of the 18th century. Burns collected and wrote the vast majority of his songs for two rather prestigious collections: the six volume Scots Musical Museum published by Edinburgh printer James Johnson and George Thomson’s opulent Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. </p>
<p>Both came with rather classical arrangements by the likes of Joseph Haydn and Beethoven, aimed at a highbrow audience. It wouldn’t have been Burns’ farmer friends purchasing such books but rather his subscribers, patrons and merchant friends. Eddie Reader fans might want to brace themselves. </p>
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<h2>The project</h2>
<p>We have been working on Burns’ songs as part of a five-year <a href="http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk/">research project</a> called Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century. To explore where they came from, we enlisted 11 music students to produce 25 recordings using the two original publications as our performance texts (included below are two lesser known songs: Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat and Scroggam, My Dearie). </p>
<p>Through a series of workshops they learned what an 18th-century singing lesson would have been like and how 18th-century dress might have affected their breathing or playing. They worked on the songs with professional coaching, using instruments of the time: gut-stringed violins and cellos, harpsichord and an early version of the piano called the fortepiano. To add a sense of period environment, we recorded the performances at Glasgow’s Pollok House – not a venue that Burns visited himself, but one built during his lifetime. </p>
<p>Everyone found it challenging to perform the songs with their original instrumental accompaniments and sometimes they needed to amend things that didn’t work comfortably. Several performers struggled with the keys of the songs – often the singer was having to sing in too high a key or where the melodies ranged between very high and low notes. This was common for fiddle tunes, which were often the melodic basis of Burns’ songs. </p>
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<p>What was really noticeable was how difficult some of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-auld-lang-syne-switched-tunes-en-route-to-world-domination-52556">Thomson accompaniments</a> were. They demanded that players could read music fluently and play to a high level of skill. This would have been a problem for many amateur players in Burns’ day, since these publications were intended to encourage people to play the songs at home. </p>
<p>Incidentally the original compositions were even more complicated: Thomson <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-reception-of-robert-burns-in-europe-9781441170316/">had to</a> ask the likes of Beethoven to supply him with simpler piano parts for the young ladies of Edinburgh. (The Scots Musical Museum songs are musically simpler and not so prescriptive, so there’s more choice in how you perform them.)</p>
<h2>The real Burns needn’t stand up</h2>
<p>There is little doubt that Burns enjoyed and was inspired by a good song whether in his own front room, at the harvest or in his local howff. But after he first visited Edinburgh in 1787 and met James Johnson, he was inspired by performances in the city’s drawing rooms and performed his poetry to people who both produced and bought the song collections of the day. </p>
<p>When he was asked to contribute songs for two of these collections, he <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QZonCAXh3O4C&pg=PA109&lpg=PA109&dq=%22the+impulse+of+Enthusiasm%22+Burns&source=bl&ots=vZlMafZBO-&sig=hMcSwkD4mYEo3d4GArddUK_8pg4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiM7ryF76LPAhXCDsAKHc4yCpcQ6AEIKjAF#v=onepage&q=%22the%20impulse%20of%20Enthusiasm%22%20Burns&f=false">threw himself into it with</a> “the impulse of enthusiasm”, as he put it, contributing many old fiddle standards and in many cases writing entirely new words for them. </p>
<p>All subsequent editions of Burns removed the original accompaniments and published only words with melodies or names of tunes alongside. This enabled lots of different kinds of performances, which meant later Burns enthusiasts could locate the music in a setting more “in tune” with the common man – keeping the songs very much alive in popular music culture along the way. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/l_OJHLOkWuE?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>There’s certainly nothing wrong with this direction of travel, so long as we recognise how these songs originally sounded. We really hope people will enjoy the songs we’ve recorded, even if these fancy original accompaniments might not be everyone’s cup of tea. </p>
<p>But we are being untrue to the great man if we don’t acknowledge that his songs first appeared to his own public in this way. We ought to pause and appreciate them for what they are.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65900/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.</span></em></p>After the Scottish bard mixed with Edinburgh high society, he started dabbling with Beethoven.Kirsteen McCue, Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/535782016-01-25T06:19:33Z2016-01-25T06:19:33ZHaggis, neeps and soliloquys: the bonds that tie Robert Burns and Shakespeare<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109008/original/image-20160122-444-v0ruen.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bard blood</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>While Robert Burns lovers celebrate their great advocate for the common man on January 25, this year’s whisky-and-haggis feast for the birth of the Scottish bard risks being upstaged by a big literary milestone south of the border. This year is the 400th anniversary of the death of the bard of Avon, better known as William Shakespeare. As it turns out, the two countries’ national writers have a lot in common. </p>
<p>Both men would likely have been surprised at their elevations to the status of iconic cultural figures. Shakespeare had <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/standingonmyhead/2015/05/ten-reasons-why-shakespeare-was-catholic.html">strong connections</a> to Catholics and may have secretly been one himself at a time in Elizabethan and Jacobean England when such sympathies could be perilous. As he made his way in society, for example, one establishment commentator <a href="http://www.literarygenius.info/william-shakespeare-upstart-crow.htm">called him</a> an “upstart crow” – boastful and above his station. </p>
<p>Burns was meanwhile hated by large numbers of Scotland’s Calvinist establishment. After they <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/Y0W2CBy5F200xcjPx0zwgm/robert-burns">censured</a> his liberal lifestyle in his earlier years, he responded by mocking their tradition through works like <a href="http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/holy_willie.htm">Holy Willie’s Prayer</a>. </p>
<p>Yet in spite of their enemies, both writers were able to establish living reputations through sheer force of creative energy. Through Burns, for instance, Scots-language poetry came to be largely accepted in the west of Scotland when previously it was strongly associated with the east and especially the <a href="http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandshistory/unioncrownsparliaments/jacobites/">Jacobites</a>, those 18th-century rebel supporters of the deposed Stuart dynasty. Shakespeare’s productivity, both as a playwright and as a stage manager, also made him a very public figure in his own lifetime.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109009/original/image-20160122-403-1wo6m68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109009/original/image-20160122-403-1wo6m68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109009/original/image-20160122-403-1wo6m68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109009/original/image-20160122-403-1wo6m68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109009/original/image-20160122-403-1wo6m68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=388&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109009/original/image-20160122-403-1wo6m68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109009/original/image-20160122-403-1wo6m68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109009/original/image-20160122-403-1wo6m68.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=488&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Great Chieftain O …</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/11360271@N05/2218646649/in/photolist-4o49mr-jLEejM-bjoEB6-bjoFNa-bjoGUr-bjoHVr-bjoLER-bjoKyD-bjoJkx-4mN42v-4mN4FM-4mN4ka-4mS7bq-4mS6KY-4mN4dV-4mS6fq-4mN4K4-4mS86j-4mN3A6-4mN3jt-4mS7pS-4mS8gN-4mN55P-4mN4gp-4mN3an-4mS8d1-4mN3TK-4mS7Ej-4mN49V-4mN5wk-4mS6yj-4mS6q9-4mS6vh-4mN46n-4mS7gf-4mN52P-4mN594-4mS82q-4mN3tP-4mS89f-4mS7kC-4mS6EE-4mS6jb-bjp9pi-bjoZTR-bjp6Ft-bjoRTn-bjp5wR-bjoVgZ-bjoSZx">John Sloan</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Rabbie’s pound of flesh</h2>
<p>William Shakespeare was a powerful influence on Robert Burns. If the latter exemplified certain Scottish literary and cultural traditions, he did so with Shakespeare in his DNA. In <a href="https://burnsletters.wordpress.com">his letters</a>, Burns turns to Shakespeare on several dozen occasions. I also count as many as 16 references to Shakespeare’s plays in his poetry. </p>
<p>There are a number of instances in which Burns inhabits the atmosphere of his predecessor’s works – the beautiful and powerful meditative poem <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/works/144.shtml">A Winter Night</a> does this with King Lear, for instance. Both works draw on the sense of man’s menace and power of forgiveness. Or take Burns’ phrase “man’s inhumanity to man”, from <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/works/55.shtml">Man Was Made To Mourn: A Dirge</a>. The paradoxical turn of phrase and sympathy, which helped establish Burns as the great poet of humanity, owe more than a little to his immersion in the works of Shakespeare – and is often mistakenly attributed to him. </p>
<p>Another thing Shakespeare and Burns have in common is the way their reputations grew after they died – and particularly flourished in the 19th century. This wasn’t just down to individual genius, but also British imperialism. Shakespeare became a staple of the educational curriculums of both America and India in the 1800s. Back in Britain, young gentlemen preparing for colonial careers had to know their Shakespeare as part of the Indian Civil Service exam. Burns’ work travelled well in that era too, carried to all corners of the English-speaking world by aspiring Scots who felt they could emulate their national poet’s story of great success through effort despite humble origins. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109012/original/image-20160122-421-uxyyy2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109012/original/image-20160122-421-uxyyy2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/109012/original/image-20160122-421-uxyyy2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=827&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109012/original/image-20160122-421-uxyyy2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=827&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109012/original/image-20160122-421-uxyyy2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=827&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109012/original/image-20160122-421-uxyyy2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109012/original/image-20160122-421-uxyyy2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/109012/original/image-20160122-421-uxyyy2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1039&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">From Rabbie With Love.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/nelc/33206095/in/photolist-5o1j99-pzzchK-fiihN2-fixtJ9-nyND-2Wj28W-LfYy6-ao1W77-vwEv6-buwWN-7M7JAL-fixCAy-fiijDK-fiimDM-fiirXn-fiinFD-fiigKr-fiiosx-fiiiEg-cNazA-3GLeFP-r7EHA-3Wc1V-3Wc1T-nZDDdt-dT61tJ-pgMQBg-4xHBKB-ph4TSr-4ftZhD">Wikimedia</a></span>
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<p>The two bards’ global reach was helped by their ability to inspire the downtrodden. Shakespeare was read by Nelson Mandela when he was imprisoned on Robben Island, for example, while his portrait stared down on the first Congress of Soviet Writers in Russia in 1934. They <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uSPq-2hGnFUC&pg=PA412&lpg=PA412&dq=Congress+of+Soviet+Writers+in+Russia+in+1934+Shakespeare&source=bl&ots=brOwUWVXKi&sig=hEM-OlbGDtc62gWofCoE6bewxbE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjD2r6ZvL3KAhUFcA8KHeG1D8sQ6AEIIjAA#v=onepage&q=Congress%20of%20Soviet%20Writers%20in%20Russia%20in%201934%20Shakespeare&f=false">regarded him</a> as someone whose works were full of sensitive portrayals of the common man. </p>
<p>Burns too had a <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=RRn5BgAAQBAJ&pg=PR52&lpg=PR52&dq=%22Robert+Burns%22+%22Soviet+Union%22+stamp&source=bl&ots=ixaj_Kxeh0&sig=Glfy4mlrSGwlNinfQ_tEVBOrVbw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwju6va9vL3KAhXCtA8KHbd1D4sQ6AEIUzAM#v=onepage&q=%22Robert%20Burns%22%20%22Soviet%20Union%22%20stamp&f=false">Soviet fanbase</a>, read in Moscow and elsewhere in the early 20th century as the proletarian writer par excellence who had so much in particular to say about peasant life. The Soviet Union produced the first ever commemorative Burns stamps in 1959 (see image). He was also read by many Indian socialists in that same period as they constructed a critique of their colonial condition. </p>
<h2>The humanity question</h2>
<p>Shakespeare and Burns write time and again about great vicissitudes in human life, as well as continuously hymning the beauty of creation. Both abhor fanaticism – for Burns, the hypocritical Calvinists; for Shakespeare, unbending Puritans. And both are great believers in gratuitous goodness. In <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/merchant/full.html">The Merchant of Venice</a> Shakespeare famously celebrates the grace in the kind, forgiving act:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The quality of mercy is not strained;<br>
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven<br>
Upon the place beneath. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Similarly in <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/works/144.shtml">A Winter Night</a>, Burns writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress<br>
A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss! </p>
</blockquote>
<p>And:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The heart benevolent and kind<br>
The most resembles God. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This sense of common cause is something that is vital when we think about these two writers, especially because Shakespeare and Burns represent two nations seen to have been at odds in recent years. Their secret – whisper it – is that there is so much of minutely considered human experience in their observations and characters that people of any nationality can look at their work and see something they recognise. Really we ought to be emphasising the continuity between Shakespeare and Burns. If one is allowed to say this these days in a non-political way, they ought to be held in common cultural heritage as world writers by the whole of Britain.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/53578/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gerard is Director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow</span></em></p>Why Scotland should raise a glass to a certain Brummie Bill.Gerard Carruthers, Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/525562015-12-31T09:51:37Z2015-12-31T09:51:37ZHow Auld Lang Syne switched tunes en route to world domination<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106689/original/image-20151218-27894-hxv5zz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">All together now ...</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/life_of_gillman/341987969/in/photolist-wdM7i-dGepBz-pg8133-5QzBqE-87k3t-6NNd29-FhuAF-7rZ1gM-9vvnhi-5RRyfQ-7Yifj-63kb7D-4iWgMU-98bByv-6NNbVQ-tes2qs-tw49dX-teAxZi-sz2wC9-tw4bgV-tw44TV-tw3zRH-tw3vt4-szdLTR-tert55-tw3wTt-ttHjvJ-tw45pe-8LJrfa-ttHjrL-tw8Ckg-e4EBfr-4k7MQ6-terGcY-tw87FB-teAqNz-ttHUAC-tw8Lg6-tw4626-sz2zbq-tvKxiC-tet36q-bgrLB2-6thYeZ-bi8F4k-6ugQAY-dFxpY8-dFxpZ4-dFxpxz-p1J3aH">Matthew Goodman</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Auld Lang Syne was famously written by the Scottish national bard, <a href="http://www.robertburns.org">Robert Burns</a>. What is less well known is that the melody was not the one he intended. The one that became famous was first attached to the song in the late 1790s and Burns, who died in 1796, knew nothing about it. </p>
<p>The man who published the soon-to-be-famous song was an Edinburgh song editor, <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/encyclopedia/ThomsonGeorge1757-1851.858.shtml">George Thomson</a>. Burns had told him a few years earlier that a melody was usually his starting point for writing a song. Yet his inspiration in 1788 when he wrote Auld Lang Syne, which translates roughly as Old Time’s Sake, was actually not a melody but an <a href="http://digital.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/14548">existing song</a> with the same opening line – “Should auld acquaintance be forgot”. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106690/original/image-20151218-27884-i1kgyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106690/original/image-20151218-27884-i1kgyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/106690/original/image-20151218-27884-i1kgyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=742&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106690/original/image-20151218-27884-i1kgyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=742&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106690/original/image-20151218-27884-i1kgyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=742&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106690/original/image-20151218-27884-i1kgyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106690/original/image-20151218-27884-i1kgyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/106690/original/image-20151218-27884-i1kgyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Yer bard’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=robert+burns&hl=en&biw=1440&bih=762&site=webhp&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiM1sDW8OXJAhVF0hoKHaFZBpgQ_AUIBigB#q=robert+burns&hl=en&tbm=isch&tbs=sur:fc&imgrc=x_pR4TJH26J-_M%3A">Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Scholars have dated versions as far back as the 16th century, to a song called <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/encyclopedia/AuldLangSyne.5.shtml">Auld Kyndnes Foryett</a>. Burns himself would have known several versions that were popular in print and performance throughout the 18th century. His song is much closer to these versions than the 16th-century original. <a href="http://www.themorgan.org/collection/Auld-Lang-Syne/3">One of these</a>, by the poet Allan Ramsay, is set against a backdrop of war and talks of the parting of lovers. Burns typically opens this out and makes it more universal. </p>
<p>When he sent his version of Auld Lang Syne to his great friend Frances Dunlop in 1788, he told her he’d heard an old man singing it. There’s no evidence of who this man might have been – and Burns may even have fabricated the story to show how close he was to popular culture.</p>
<h2>The melody switches</h2>
<p>When Auld Lang Syne was first published in the Scots Musical Museum collection in 1796, it was joined to a rather slow and haunting tune. This melody really brings out an element of sadness in the text. It has found new popularity in recent years, but we don’t know whether Burns chose it or not. He told George Thomson in 1793 that he didn’t think much of the tune commonly sung to existing versions of the song. </p>
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<p>Thomson needed no more encouragement to switch to the melody that we know today. Much more celebratory in feel, it had appeared in some earlier 18th-century fiddle collections and was often referred to as The Miller’s Wedding or The Miller’s Daughter. By the time Thomson had made the decision to marry the tune to Burns’ text, the poet had died and there was no chance of asking his opinion on the matter. But certainly Burns would have known it, since he wrote another song called <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/works/372.shtml">O Can Ye Labour Lea (1792)</a> for a variant of the same tune. </p>
<p>Thomson characteristically forged ahead and sent the tune to Vienna, where the Bohemian composer <a href="http://www.britannica.com/biography/Leopold-Kozeluch">Leopold Koželuch</a> set it for voice, piano, violin and cello. Auld Lang Syne then appeared in Thomson’s <a href="http://www.abebooks.co.uk/Select-Collection-Original-Scottish-Airs-Voice/283962004/bd">Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs</a> in 1799, set to the famous tune for the first time. From then on, it gathered popular momentum across the British isles and beyond through social gatherings – often Masonic ones – and in many theatrical productions. </p>
<h2>Nae gowans, nae stowps</h2>
<p>When we chant Auld Lang Syne this New Year, we’ll probably sing only a couple of Burns’ original verses. We’ll leave out the drinking verse where we fill our “pint stowp” (pint cup) and the rather affectionate verses about “paidl’d in the burn” (paddled in the stream) or “pu'ing the gowans fine” (picked the daisies fine). Instead we’ll concentrate only on looking back, remembering fondly and joining hands of friendship. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/14mFabPxk80?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Why the song became world famous is still something of a mystery, though all that socialising and theatre-going in the 19th century must have helped. Burns had died in considerable debt and it really is too bad that performing rights were a thing of the future. As many will be aware, Happy Birthday <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/sep/23/us-judge-rules-happy-birthday-is-public-domain-throws-out-copyright-claim">has been</a> a gold mine for Warner Music over the years. While Auld Lang Syne sits right beside it as one of the most popular songs of all time, it never made any royalties for anyone. </p>
<p><em>There is a <a href="http://burnsc21.glasgow.ac.uk">virtual exhibition</a> about Auld Lang Syne on the University of Glasgow project website, Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/52556/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kirsteen is currently involved in a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council called Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century. </span></em></p>The great Scottish ode to the passing years may never have become a global hit had an Edinburgh lothario not changed the recipe.Kirsteen McCue, Professor of Scottish Literature and Song Culture, University of GlasgowLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/366682015-01-24T15:01:16Z2015-01-24T15:01:16ZHow to make Robert Burns as big as Shakespeare in China<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69879/original/image-20150123-24531-gcgi3k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Mandarin icing next year?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/60399953@N00/4319412965/in/photolist-7zG7Zk-4jkQpy-bzP4X6-6EYmUp-bzP1H8-oBEEkA-8hzQG-ctXe1U-edT55Q-6h3n6r-dStZiE-4riX4i-o18QRR-obBMfV-fNFgM5-bmUe1u-jvZakK-9Krj25-d3ATJb-5V2ZCZ-dohKS2-dStYwW-7Nt4P4-bnnMgd-dXXQBv-bmUdEE-d3AM9A-cLQmrj-i59bty-biryFZ-KB6W5-a7uVJ-d3AMJU-cBf1Xf-5cB53m-dSomFR-6feoUb-kCR7a4-gYRQGw-a8AN7q-5VdymM-qAUddu-jJbKNE-ipqbe8-61w6dV-5cwNqn-cU2n49-7jgoKx-3zDLh-dSurgN">tycobass</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As long as the history of English literature is taught in universities, the charm of the immortal poem <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/works/444.shtml">“A Red, Red Rose”</a> by Robert Burns will endure in China. I first came across the poem by the national bard of Scotland about 30 years ago as an undergraduate studying English literature, and my love for it has never decreased since. </p>
<p>I have been teaching Burns’s poems to students of my university, Hebei Normal University in northern China, since 1992. I cannot remember the names of all the graduates who took my course of English and American poetry, but I always recognise them immediately when they say: “I learned ‘A Red, Red Rose’ from you.” </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cBCQMWMbeMU?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<h2>Sweet on William</h2>
<p>Now I have come to Scotland as a visiting scholar devoted to translating about a hundred of Burns’s poems into modern Chinese with a view to making Burns as famous as Shakespeare in my homeland. Burns is known in China, both for “A Red, Red Rose” and “<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173069">Scots Wha Hae</a>,” which is appreciated for its patriotism. But very few of his other works will have been read by other people in China. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69880/original/image-20150123-24505-2izw5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69880/original/image-20150123-24505-2izw5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69880/original/image-20150123-24505-2izw5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1387&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69880/original/image-20150123-24505-2izw5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1387&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69880/original/image-20150123-24505-2izw5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1387&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69880/original/image-20150123-24505-2izw5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1743&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69880/original/image-20150123-24505-2izw5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1743&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69880/original/image-20150123-24505-2izw5a.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1743&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Shakespeare: big in China.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&searchterm=shakespeare&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=133827188">Ron and Joe</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Among Shakespeare’s works, <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html">Hamlet</a> and <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/romeo_juliet/full.html">Romeo and Juliet</a> are probably the two plays that are best known, along with <a href="http://www.shakespeare-online.com/sonnets/18.html">Sonnet 18</a>, with its famous opening line “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”</p>
<p>Shakespeare enjoys more fame in China for a number of reasons. There are many Chinese versions of his complete works, as well as some of the individual plays, his sonnets and the two long poems. This means that any educated person can read his work. Better still, Chinese publishers have produced translations that include Chinese and English, so readers can enjoy the original at the same time. </p>
<p>There are also many research organisations dedicated to the study of Shakespeare, both at national and provincial level. Some universities have established dedicated “Shakespeare Studies” courses for postgraduates and even sometimes undergraduates; while some have compiled a textbook to improve listening and speaking based on the animated tales of Shakespeare. Finally, many troupes perform Shakespeare’s plays in Chinese. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69881/original/image-20150123-24515-1u1sc4e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69881/original/image-20150123-24515-1u1sc4e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69881/original/image-20150123-24515-1u1sc4e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69881/original/image-20150123-24515-1u1sc4e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69881/original/image-20150123-24515-1u1sc4e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69881/original/image-20150123-24515-1u1sc4e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69881/original/image-20150123-24515-1u1sc4e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69881/original/image-20150123-24515-1u1sc4e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Can China learn to love another British bard?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/mricon/8922362/in/photolist-53MvGH-datuq6-4VcDiD-53RH6G-RTDsN-7rnGPs-83Vu7s-2aLxQ5-ayh1tQ-AAuQS-bqLev2-8vhPco-8vhNy3-cd44tw-5DApzD-b866Ut-4tQk79-Ypmh6-53RpJL-6xDCAj-4VsEnC-N6L9T-63ukVm-4fc4KZ-j2KLC4-TkaJb-jQA1mg-4oKzPo-4xHBKB-ZJStK-Sz2bZ-QJUHQ-eipJNY-fRYTMv-dnWGKc-bVFMQB-63v5su-6xya3i-6xztAn-oa3hV7-cxe7QY-orCLtT-orTzQE-aueBSG-bLWcYk-NYNrt-QL5zn-ZJSyv-XLPvf-MJiQ">MriCon</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Burns’s position would be much enhanced if his poetry were given similar treatment. In Hebei Normal’s school of foreign languages, we have been leading the way by setting up a centre for Scotland studies in 2013, which we hope will set an example for other universities to follow (besides Burns, <a href="http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/sir-walter-scott">Sir Walter Scott</a> is another writer on the curriculum). And the more Burns translations into Chinese, the more his work is likely to flourish. Personally I am sure there will be more studies on Burns in China and many research organisations will be set up. </p>
<h2>Burns and eternal devotion</h2>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69895/original/image-20150123-24503-6py14r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69895/original/image-20150123-24503-6py14r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69895/original/image-20150123-24503-6py14r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69895/original/image-20150123-24503-6py14r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69895/original/image-20150123-24503-6py14r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69895/original/image-20150123-24503-6py14r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69895/original/image-20150123-24503-6py14r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Works every time!</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&searchterm=red%20rose&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=89023450">Pukach</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Which takes me back to “A Red, Red Rose”. It is immortal in its way of expressing love. One of the reasons for its popularity in China is that we see similar expressions in our own poetry, especially in using a vow or an oath, such as Burns’ “I will luve thee still, my Dear, Till a’ the seas gang dry… And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.”</p>
<p>In the <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/654633/yuefu">Yuefu poetry</a> of the Han dynasty (202 BC to 220 AD), there is a love poem by an anonymous writer that uses a similar vow. The poem is entitled “上邪” ("Oh,by Heaven") which goes as follows: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>上邪,/ 我欲与君相知,/ 长命无绝衰。山无陵,/ 江水为竭。冬雷震震,/ 夏雨雪。/ 天地合,/ 乃敢与君绝。 </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here is one English version:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>By heaven, / I shall love you / To the end of time! / Till mountains crumble, / Streams run dry, / Thunder rumbles in winter, / Snow falls in summer, / And the earth / mingles with the sky — / Not till then will I cease to love you!<br>
<em>(tr. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/23/yang-xianyi-obituary">Yang Xianyi</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/nov/24/guardianobituaries">Gladys Margaret Tayler</a>)</em></p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69884/original/image-20150123-24515-16ab6ai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69884/original/image-20150123-24515-16ab6ai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69884/original/image-20150123-24515-16ab6ai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69884/original/image-20150123-24515-16ab6ai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69884/original/image-20150123-24515-16ab6ai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69884/original/image-20150123-24515-16ab6ai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69884/original/image-20150123-24515-16ab6ai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69884/original/image-20150123-24515-16ab6ai.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">There were a few Chinese Burns during the Han Dynasty.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/1671174961/in/photolist-3xFd6p-dbE7Rb-5FeLtp-6oVJU2-8ur9wr-vBoY-cuf5j1-cuf55q-dasy7w-pfXeZa-dpQYzA-7KYxyP-dy71eN-cuf4Ry-ps2a1f-daLbxw-dy1x7P-cPEhdm-ps4czn-4LzSS7-4LzSFW-dpQPqD-5Fj7uY-5FeRfF-5Fj7WA-5Fj8EA-dc4FYj-5FeLSv-5Fj5mQ-5FeMAp-5FeRyg-5Fj91W-5Fj44s-nWFpy-dXFYxX-gpsKG2-oTb22S-nxvVDE-pxwSTH-daswGZ-pQ6MzY-nRN6Hn-daLbi1-daLbnS-daLbks-6bLgtW-dc4FP5-7KGQwr-dpQYrS-dpQYub">Wally Gobetz</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>There is another Chinese poem, also anonymous, that makes the same vow. The poem is entitled “菩萨蛮” (“Pusaman”) and goes like this: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>枕前发尽千般愿,/ 要休且待青山烂。/ 水面上秤錘浮,/ 直待黄河彻底枯。/ 白日参辰现, / 北斗回南面, / 休即能休,/ 且待三更见日头。 </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here is one English version of its first four lines:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On the pillow we make a thousand vows and say, / Our love lasts unless green mountains rot away. / On the water can float a lump of lead, / The Yellow River dries up to the very bed.<br>
<em>(tr. <a href="http://www.cbi.gov.cn:8080/wiseroot/pages/CBIen/translators2.page?cid=106378&page=3">Xu Yuanchong</a>)</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>So we can see that this idea of eternal love is a sentiment shared by people of UK and people of China. Literature is thus compared and studied. Culture is thus exchanged.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/36668/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zhengshuan Li does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As long as the history of English literature is taught in universities, the charm of the immortal poem “A Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns will endure in China. I first came across the poem by the national…Zhengshuan Li, Visiting Scholar, University of StirlingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/366832015-01-23T18:23:18Z2015-01-23T18:23:18ZHaggis, neeps and badness: it’s time we faced the dark side of Robert Burns<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69922/original/image-20150123-24525-1is99fx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Romantic notions of Burns as a lovable man of the people are a little rich</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&search_tracking_id=xwjQ4fXE8mroVOpxLXIPgg&searchterm=robert%20burns&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=1732336">Elnur</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Robert Burns may have lost some of the nationalist charge behind his popularity since Scotland <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/events/scotland-decides">voted No</a> in last year’s referendum. But the celebrated poet continues to be fêted internationally during annual <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/suppers/">Burns Suppers</a> from Glasgow to New York, from Toronto to Calcutta, in a ritual that has been honed since the early 19th century. </p>
<p>All speakers at Burns Night celebrations, myself included, are expected to reflect on the poet’s continuing significance in a world that he likely would not recognise as his own. So where did this practice originate, and why was a poet with so many character flaws elevated into the pantheon of Scottish national icons like <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/wallace_william.shtml">William Wallace</a> and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/history/articles/robert_the_bruce/">Robert the Bruce</a>?</p>
<h2>The Edinburgh set</h2>
<p>The <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/heritage/scots-fact-of-the-day-robert-burns-and-jamaica-1-3666374">story of</a> Burns’s sudden success in 1786 is well known, along with his <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/profiles/Y0W2CBy5F200xcjPx0zwgm/robert-burns">nom de plume</a> of “the heaven-taught ploughman” – a rather unlucky persona created for him by the critic and novelist <a href="http://www.enotes.com/topics/henry-mackenzie">Henry Mackenzie</a>. Burns frequently found himself invited by the Edinburgh literati to play this role of the inspired rustic, a stock figure much in vogue in those days. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69924/original/image-20150123-24541-1iavk7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69924/original/image-20150123-24541-1iavk7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69924/original/image-20150123-24541-1iavk7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69924/original/image-20150123-24541-1iavk7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69924/original/image-20150123-24541-1iavk7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=759&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69924/original/image-20150123-24541-1iavk7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69924/original/image-20150123-24541-1iavk7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69924/original/image-20150123-24541-1iavk7o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=953&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Burns: rustic rub.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml?lang=en&language=en&ref_site=photo&search_source=search_form&version=llv1&anyorall=all&safesearch=1&use_local_boost=1&search_tracking_id=xwjQ4fXE8mroVOpxLXIPgg&searchterm=robert%20burns&show_color_wheel=1&orient=&commercial_ok=&media_type=images&search_cat=&searchtermx=&photographer_name=&people_gender=&people_age=&people_ethnicity=&people_number=&color=&page=1&inline=239399143">Everett Historical</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His unsurprising dislike of this role led not a few literati to deride Burns’ manner as rude and coarse, while <a href="http://www.fullbooks.com/The-Letters-of-Robert-Burns6.html">he described</a> their spotlight as a “glare” in his letters. Yet the process of reconfiguring the man into a national icon had begun – a role he undeniably desired. And the advance publicity stuck, despite Burns’s efforts to withdraw from the public eye and spend the remainder of his brief life with his family, collecting Scottish songs (for which he <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/85716/Robert-Burns">famously refused</a> both payment and acknowledgement, seeing it as a service to Scotland). </p>
<p>Succeeding generations of Burnsians would excuse or censor the poet’s many indiscretions, which were usually prompted by excessive desires for sex and drink, along with his penchant for radical politics and free-thinking in religion. The image that emerged of Burns in the 19th century and is still exceedingly popular was that of a sentimental peasant. </p>
<p>Here’s an early example from James Currie’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=nXECAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA209&lpg=PA209&dq=James+Currie+Burns+Works+1800&source=bl&ots=DbAuvovRqV&sig=hSJNKgskTVRqZJxLntcp3gWhk-I&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XYjCVJy8OoTgapetgZAM&ved=0CEkQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=James%20Currie%20Burns%20Works%201800&f=false">first edition</a> of Burns’s Works (1800):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Robert Burns was, in reality, what he has been represented to be, a Scottish peasant… The incidents which form the subjects of his poems, though some of them highly interesting and susceptible of poetical imagery, are incidents in the life of a peasant who takes no pains to disguise the lowliness of his condition.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>One of the key figures in developing this view of Burns was Walter Scott, (the two met when Scott was 15) who played a much wider role in helping to create a sanitised and patriotic sense of Scotland in the early part of the 19th century. We have long been encouraged to think of Burns as a man of great talents and virtues, a flawed genius whose errors could be repressed in the interests of maintaining him as a national icon that would unite Scots the world over. He would be the Poet of Scotland, for better or worse.</p>
<h2>The unvarnished truth</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69925/original/image-20150123-24525-11jwb33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69925/original/image-20150123-24525-11jwb33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69925/original/image-20150123-24525-11jwb33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69925/original/image-20150123-24525-11jwb33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69925/original/image-20150123-24525-11jwb33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=943&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69925/original/image-20150123-24525-11jwb33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69925/original/image-20150123-24525-11jwb33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69925/original/image-20150123-24525-11jwb33.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1186&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Still game!</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/s/distillery+whisky/search.html?page=3&thumb_size=mosaic&inline=91860044">Farr Studios</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I say for worse because it has led to long-lasting falsifications of his actual life and works, as well as severe distortions of his character and its relevance to his writing. In truth, he was a deeply flawed man. </p>
<p>His shabby treatment of the women in his life, especially his long-suffering <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/encyclopedia/BurnsJeanArmour1767-1834.160.shtml">wife Jean</a>, cannot be defended on any grounds. Despite the efforts of many biographers over the years, it is also difficult to explain away his penchant for excessive convivial pleasure; he may not have been an alcoholic in today’s parlance, but he clearly enjoyed drinking a lot. </p>
<p>He was also particularly ungenerous to other labouring-class poets who sought to follow his example and enjoy a taste of literary fame. In a letter he derided their efforts as the writhing of a “shoal of ill-spawned monsters”. </p>
<p>Contrary to <a href="http://socialistunity.com/the-people%E2%80%99s-poet-robert-burns-1759-1796/">ideas about</a> his unstinting radicalism, Burns could be sycophantic and hysterical in his efforts to retain his position at the Excise, asserting his loyalty to Great Britain by <a href="http://www.aforceforgood.org.uk/precious/rburns1">joining the</a> Dumfries Volunteers late in his life to fight the French should they invade. All of these facts have been actively suppressed to protect Burns’ reputation, as were some of his works for many years, <a href="http://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1700&context=ssl">not least</a> the bawdy Merry Muses of Caledonia. </p>
<p>This process, one that is reinvigorated every Burns Night, began less than ten years after the poet’s death in 1796. A group of devotees in Paisley near Glasgow <a href="http://www.paisleyburnsclub.org.uk/heritage1.htm">created the</a> first Burns Club in 1805. This included the poet and songwriter <a href="http://www.roberttannahillfederation.com/1.html">Robert Tannahill</a>, who wrote the first club verse about Burns’s “immortal memory”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69926/original/image-20150123-24546-1eu7ket.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69926/original/image-20150123-24546-1eu7ket.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69926/original/image-20150123-24546-1eu7ket.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69926/original/image-20150123-24546-1eu7ket.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69926/original/image-20150123-24546-1eu7ket.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=411&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69926/original/image-20150123-24546-1eu7ket.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69926/original/image-20150123-24546-1eu7ket.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69926/original/image-20150123-24546-1eu7ket.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=516&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The traditional supper dates back to the early 19th century Burns Clubs.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/gertcha/5388464648/in/photolist-9dahNU-b4XapV-7ynKGx-9anPgj-9ajE5n-9ajC9t-4D78GR-7y8CwU-6zboge-7y8u8L-8iXe4U-7y8wLw-9dkKPp-7y8REo-7y8L1q-7y8CGL-7y4RTZ-7y8xUN-7y8DKU-7y4HsB-7y4Vva-7y8Jfd-7y4S5v-7y8D3S-7y4RJt-7y4XF8-7y4EUV-7y8Ez3-7y4MRe-7y8BFW-7y4GLv-7y4Et2-7y8yw9-7y8FH5-7y4RuH-7y4NTr-7y8PME-7y4V5r-7y8NAu-7y4Zzn-7y8LZS-7y52tv-7y8Qmo-7y4KYz-7y4UTx-7y8AwS-7y4Z3F-7y4JsR-7y4PQv-7y4UH4">Stuart Chalmers</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Burns clubs then grew exponentially, emerging all over the world throughout the 19th century. Many notable literary figures were among their ranks, including the Scottish poet <a href="http://www.poemhunter.com/thomas-campbell/">Thomas Campbell</a> and the American writers <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/ralph-waldo-emerson-9287153">Ralph Waldo Emerson</a> and <a href="http://www.hwlongfellow.org/">Henry Wadsworth Longfellow</a> (among many others). </p>
<p>Religious Scots expressed some ambivalence about such veneration, leading the Reverend William Peebles in 1811 <a href="http://www.robertburns.org/encyclopedia/ReligionBurnsand.737.shtml">to coin</a> the rather lame term “Burnomania” to describe the cultural “insania” surrounding the poet. Other religious critics sought to defend Burns from such charges. The Reverend Hamilton Paul mounted one such defence, writing an exculpatory preface to his edition of Burns’ works in 1819. By that time, the poet’s “immortal memory” was already well established, even though the more orthodox of Paul’s colleagues may have wondered if he too suffered from “Burnomania”.</p>
<h2>Burns now</h2>
<p>In the present day, our understanding of Burns has been enriched by the <a href="http://www.bucknell.edu/script/upress/book.asp?f=s&id=2485">thriving scholarship</a> that has grown in the late 2000s, especially in the wake of the first <a href="http://www.snh.gov.uk/enjoying-the-outdoors/homecoming-scotland-2014/about-homecoming-scotland/">Scottish Homecoming</a> and celebration of Burns’ 250th birthday in 2009. That said, his reputation is still bedevilled by long-standing misinterpretations of his life and work. In particular, he is still misappropriated to aid the causes of endless warring parties (political, religious, cultural, you name it!). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69928/original/image-20150123-24546-t3c7ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69928/original/image-20150123-24546-t3c7ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/69928/original/image-20150123-24546-t3c7ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69928/original/image-20150123-24546-t3c7ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69928/original/image-20150123-24546-t3c7ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69928/original/image-20150123-24546-t3c7ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69928/original/image-20150123-24546-t3c7ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/69928/original/image-20150123-24546-t3c7ig.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How Scotland celebrated Rabbie’s 200th in 2009.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/lastyearsgirl_/3222622691/in/photolist-5TDppP-5ULMsc-6q5QJA-5V7LbQ-6HxJ7Q-6H6tcL-6qaEw1-6qim5w-6oqVuK-6ordcx-6orbH2-6oqXb8-6or4x6-6oqZxT-6ov5Tb-6or7rR-6ov7N3-6DrpSs-67r6TN-7eJo2W-66VKEV-62rsrW-66VC8z-6DngaH-7jgJph-7jgHL7-7jgHeY-6GDEsr-7jgPCS-67zfJj-67z2zs-6GDJsX-6TNYVu-6GHHnQ-6GDHwM-6TNYRW-6YH3re-6GHLxN-6YGZS2-6YH16D-6ax3S5-6MSYtm-6H2r2r-6H2qVT-6H2rbD-6H6tzj-6H2r5R-6H6tvw-6H6tJ1-6H2qk2">Lis Ferla</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But that doesn’t prevent his name and legacy being an opportunity for social pleasure once a year (twice if you count New Year), when the slightly absurd rituals governing the Burns Supper are re-enacted around the world. Whether the poet’s works are much read beyond such occasions seems immaterial when considering his popular cultural esteem as the enduring Poet of Scotland. </p>
<p>But the real challenge is to appreciate him in this role while still recognising his very human weaknesses. That is the only way to understand his lasting legacy truthfully, in a spirit that the poet himself might appreciate were he alive today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/36683/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Corey E. Andrews does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Robert Burns may have lost some of the nationalist charge behind his popularity since Scotland voted No in last year’s referendum. But the celebrated poet continues to be fêted internationally during annual…Corey E. Andrews, Associate Professor of English, Youngstown State UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/284802014-06-26T05:07:11Z2014-06-26T05:07:11ZScotland Decides ’14: does anyone really care what celebrities think?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/52358/original/9vn6zd8z-1403788247.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">"If Scotland votes yes, it'll be the end of the Hogwarts Express!"</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://images.pressassociation.com/meta/2.17948324.html">Anthony Devlin</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Barely a day goes by when there’s not another famous face giving a nod or a headshake to independence. Most recently Daniel Radcliffe and veteran Scottish comic actor Stanley Baxter have both said no, while Elijah Wood appeared to come out for yes <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/what-s-on/film/scottish-independence-mix-up-for-elijah-wood-1-3457123">before later saying</a> he had misunderstood the question. Days earlier it was JK Rowling and the Pope (both on the no side), while pro-independence actor Brian Cox was <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b04835y1/scotland-2014-24062014">on the BBC’s Scotland 2014</a> programme last night restating his views. We asked our panel whether any of these interventions made any difference. </p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Neil Blain, Professor of Media, University of Stirling</strong></p>
<p>I draw a big distinction between comments from the likes of Hilary Clinton or Barack Obama or the chief executives of large multinational companies and celebrities in the narrower, showbiz sense. My sense is that with the showbiz personalities, it’s fairly balanced between yes and no, though honestly I doubt very much if they sway anyone. I’m pretty sure that Elijah Wood does not outrank world leaders in terms of importance to voters. </p>
<p>When you look at the overseas politicians and the business leaders, I’m not seeing much encouragement to vote yes. Does this matter? When you get a rash of comments from, let’s say, the Chinese and the Americans, many in the Scottish audience will see it simply as the work of the British government and meet it with a certain amount of scepticism. </p>
<p>On the other hand, maybe the drip drip effect could have some influence in the sense that it does seem to reinforce an environment in the media that feels more sympathetic to no than yes. It results in the SNP senior spokespeople continually on the back foot, having to react. Saying that, we’re in a situation where <a href="http://blog.whatscotlandthinks.org/2013/09/snppanelbase-poll-shows-one-point-yes-lead/">only one poll</a>, which was commissioned by the SNP, has shown yes to be in the lead. A lot of people who have already made up their minds will not be swayed by these endorsements. Where it might have some effect is on the don’t knows. </p>
<p>I don’t think we are going to hear from Angela Merkel because she’s too smart, but one comment either way would probably make a bigger difference than the rest of them put together. I would count it as a genuine boost if she said Scotland could survive as an independent country. </p>
<p><strong>Chris Whatley, Professor of Scottish History, University of Dundee</strong></p>
<p>I struggle to understand why we take so seriously the views of actors, or singers (other perhaps than singer-songwriters). Actors spend their working lives reading scripts written by other people, and pretending to be someone they’re not. Their business is escapism. They’re no more political philosophers than a joiner or painter of decorator or anyone else who aspires to master their craft. Why on earth should the thoughts on Scottish independence of a very fine character actor like Brian Cox be worth listening to any more than the proverbial man in the bus queue? In a sense, it’s a disappointing reflection of what our politicians think of us if they really are convinced that by rolling out an actor they’ll roll in the votes. </p>
<p>Even more bizarre is the practice of calling up the dead. It was not so long ago that a distinguished biographer of Robert Burns <a href="http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/battle-bard-expert-claim-robert-3013121">declared that Burns would have voted for independence</a>. Interesting. </p>
<p>Burns was notoriously a man of many voices, who expressed his liking for the British constitution as established at the Glorious Revolution of 1688-9. In this respect Burns was a whig. True, he didn’t much like the Hanoverians and had a soft spot for the Jacobites, but during his lifetime he wouldn’t have voted for independence, as then it wasn’t an issue. </p>
<p>Whether Burns would be calling for independence now is simply unknowable, and I certainly can’t imagine he’d be able to resist sending up in satirical verse the more pompous of the leading politicians on both sides of the present debate; lines from “To a Louse” come to mind (“O wad some pow’r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us”). It’s conceivable that like many Scots today, his heart would have said yes but that the risks associated with independence –- along with the job he had from the British state - would have persuaded him that we were better together. </p>
<p><strong>John Curtice, Professor of Politics, University of Strathclyde/ScotCen Social Research</strong></p>
<p>It is generally thought that if you are holding a referendum on an obscure topic, where people are therefore looking for cues as to what to think, then what both politicians and celebrities say can make a difference. For example it is very clear that <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/may/05/av-campaign-david-cameron-praised">David Cameron’s intervention</a> in the AV (alternative vote) referendum in 2011 opposing any change was important in getting Conservative supporters to vote against. But when you are talking about a referendum on a subject about which people have heard a lot and have strong views, such as the Scottish one, then somebody famous saying something is less likely to make much difference. </p>
<p>Will it anybody change their minds because of what JK Rowling thinks? Probably not. But you can see why the no campaign might see her support as beneficial. They know the media will pick the story up. It provides the media with a human interest angle to what otherwise might seem a rather dull political story. It offers a way of covering the referendum in a way that might secure people’s interest. But having said that, such endorsements are only one of a number of ways of attracting attention. </p>
<p>To have maximum credibility, it helps if the person has a long-term engagement with the issue. As a long-term independence supporter, Elaine C Smith clearly has credibility on the issue. I am not sure how influential she is, but she can certainly argue the case as effectively as any politician can. Beyond that, the celebrity needs to be squeaky clean and they need to say the right things. JK Rowling actually wrote quite a good summary of some of the key arguments in the campaign so far – and may thus have helped to generate some publicity for them. </p>
<p>I am not sure it is clear that the no campaign is ahead when it comes to celebrity endorsements. It may well be among what one might call “mainstream English language culture,” but you probably could not say that of those involved in the Scottish arts scene, and certainly not the folk or traditional music scenes. And how many celebrities have come out anyway? There are plenty of Andy Murrays out there saying, “I’m not telling you”. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/28480/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Barely a day goes by when there’s not another famous face giving a nod or a headshake to independence. Most recently Daniel Radcliffe and veteran Scottish comic actor Stanley Baxter have both said no…Christopher A Whatley, Professor of Scottish History, University of DundeeJohn Curtice, Professor of Politics, University of Strathclyde Neil Blain, Professor of Communications, Media and Culture, University of StirlingLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.